Writing & Research
I read money and machines the way I was trained to read paintings.
For more than a decade I worked inside universities, museums, and archives as an art historian and cultural researcher: provenance research and catalogues, a 400-page critical edition, digitization projects that opened thousands of objects to the public, and a DFG-funded archival project I designed and planned, which the archive carried on and other archives came to ask about. The thread through all of it was deciding what survives as evidence and how a record is read. I do the same now with money and with AI, treating them as cultural and institutional facts, with a history and a politics, never only as products or prices.
The work appears as essays, a book in progress, and a newsletter.
What I study
What a culture keeps, and what a new medium quietly lets it forget. Cultural-memory theory, training data, and who holds the power to interpret the record.
What still counts as proof once anything can be generated. Where a thing came from, and what survives forgery when the origin can be faked.
How institutions take on a technology they first refused, and why most adoption stalls.
Selected essays
The AI and governance writing, and the newer work, appear in Look again. The Bitcoin and culture writing runs mostly in Bitcoin Magazine, in print and online.
- What Does AI Remember? Cultural Memory in the Age of Large Language Models Look again. · 2026
- Anchoring Reality in the Age of AI: Bitcoin as Non-Simulable Provenance Bitcoin Magazine · Print, Issue 41 · 2026
- The Costs of Invisibility: Money, War & Fiscal Anaesthesia Look again. · 2026
- Payment Required: A Scenario Deconstruction from the Year 2036 Look again. · 2026
- The Avant-Garde and Bitcoin: Decentralized Money Didn’t Come From Nowhere Bitcoin Magazine · Big Read · 2025
- Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands at UCCA Beijing Bitcoin Magazine · 2026
- On the Value of Holding the History of Bitcoin in Your Hands Bitcoin Magazine · 2025
- A Defining Moment for Bitcoin Art at Sotheby’s: Tad Smith on Robert Alice’s Block 1 Bitcoin Magazine · 2025
- How Companies Are Adding Bitcoin Art to Their Corporate Collections Bitcoin Magazine · 2025
- Pepenardo (in Caps): The Cap Becomes Canon Bitcoin Magazine · Print, The Finance Issue · 2025
- A Brief History of Digital Art and Curation Bitcoin Magazine · Print, The Inscription Issue · 2024
All Bitcoin Magazine articles: bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/steven-reiss
Everything else: Look again. on Substack
The Culture Protocol, a book in progress
Thirty chapters that re-read the modern mind through Bitcoin: Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Yuk Hui, and others, applied to a technology they never saw.
The wager: the next stretch of adoption, for Bitcoin and for AI alike, is more cultural than it is technical.
An early chapter is online: Re-reading the Modern Mind through Bitcoin.
Look again. · the newsletter
A working principle as much as a title: take something people think they understand, and show what they have missed. It is where the AI and governance essays appear first, and where the next ones will.
Read and subscribe: stenreiss.substack.com
Scholarly work
Before Bitcoin: more than twenty scholarly essays, editions, and catalogue contributions, including for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover, the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, and the Art Collection of the University of Göttingen, plus a critical edition of Oesterley’s lectures on Raphael Sanzio da Urbino (Göttingen 2019). Full list on request.
Questions about the writing or the research are always welcome, in English or German.
I answer my own mail.
stenreiss@gmail.com