Augur, Assassination and Morality on the Blockchain

The chilling 2014 film Nightcrawler charts the rise of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom, a mildly psychotic, Travis Bickle-like character who goes from being made unemployed, having been caught stealing on the job, to becoming a successful ‘stringer’ – a freelance photojournalist who sells footage of serious and often bloody crimes to local news stations. Without giving too much away, we observe throughout the film how Bloom becomes more ‘effective’ at his new job, specifically by tampering with crime scenes and engaging in increasingly unethical behaviour as a way to extract the most shocking footage possible. And by doing so, he…...