After ten years of observation, trading and entrepreneurship, more and more, crypto appears to be most highly concerned to goal seek for the suppression of cognitive space between creator and user, between producer and buyer, to forever prevent the “I” of the developer to subordinate to the “we” of the market. The “Decentralization” touted by developers is little more than a post-modern slur, where users are to occupy wasteland of infinite relativism, disembodied of all meaningful human energies, in order to prop up the Potemkin façade lashed together in a now faraway ICO.
The “industry” has been an utter black hole of capital: users are there to perpetually finance founders in clawing the very Federal Reserve Notes they claimed they would replace. Like bureaucratic rent seekers, these firms don’t believe in behaving with any common standards or follow through like some national healthcare worker grunting at an ailing citizen.
The market has awarded tens of billions to develop valuable tools, largely based on the promise of an ideology. The macabre irony, like the sour realization that washes over one laying in a waterless Macau opium den, is that endlessly putting off pecuniary accountability to the market under the rubric of academic research or coding development at some stage becomes hateful of the liberal capitalist engine this ideology claims to uphold. Especially when the internal technical problems of the software can be solved, but the problem of making them economic goes (conveniently) unsolved or sloughed off onto a “decentralized community.” Its pre-programmed failure can then be blamed on the peasantry, setting the stage for the Holodomor campaign of the CBDC.
What is especially impressive about the crypto industry’s growth and the personal reality of many individuals concerned is how it mirrors the kind of junkyard relativism produced by the conclaves of “modern artists.” They rotate around the obsession with constructing one’s own artificial world and cartoonishly synthetic rules, and as such they do more to exclude anyone, exclude real vulnerable human interaction with the minds and wills of others, than they could ever offer to include as the new global engines of frictionless, inclusive disintermediation. Many projects are the toys of autists created to ensure that life can in fact occur entirely within the flattened, frictionless world of the internet in order to prevent from deflating the fantasy that we can live a life entirely of our own making, to mute all the stress of social interactions and economic imperatives of real human beings.
And just like Lego blocks they have their own post-modern branding. “Decentralization” means to assert that one can become sovereign and un-reliant on superstructure within this synthetic, flattened world. But this is just as much a denigration to the principle of sovereignty as applying the word “art” to a urinal. Fictional, hermetically sealed crypto-simulacrums which never demand that an “I” becomes a “we” scrupulously avoid any genuine human community or organization which inhabits a place that is ‘ours’, only to be replaced by individual plots scattered over a plane that is no one’s. It is the decentralization that screams “leave me alone so I can live in my world and you can live in yours;” the pretense that sovereignty means merely the unimportance of others. Although this may seem like sovereignty to socially constrained computer scientists, for the mass of human beings, this is the root of our modern discontent. Denaturing the importance attached to life with others is also of course a rejection of the things we share communally, economic or artistic. And it bears contempt for what we all possess as a deep, shared knowledge of what is Beauty, what is industry, and what is art, and replaces it with a petulant, autistic statement “I care nothing for your art. This (toilet) is my art.”
Masterpiece of modern art
Not only do these platforms lack economic “use cases” because only rarely if ever is any of it tied into industrial production, but worse, most digital assets have avoided anchoring to industrial cash flows because this reduces their utility as tokens in a speculative carnival. Even more challenging, they diligently avoid acquiring customers in order to avoid the semblance of having issued unregistered securities as their opening acts. Normal companies have customers on which they laser focus to improve their businesses. Here, the only customer is the blockchain developer himself, where the deliverables are tailored up to beleaguered, Neverland abstractions. None of this is aligned with us having loving lives, connection, children, meaningful work, etc. In fact they probably serve to make us incompatible with those things. The self-sovereignty that is promised is a bait and switch where you end up with less dignity and more atomization, all to shield the social fears of autists in yet one more tired, second-hand trade on the very central bank largess the crypto ideologues claim to reject.
Sir Scruton reminded us that Beauty tells us to stop thinking about ourselves and wake up to the world of others. A job, a company, which demands we get busy creating virtual worlds that only exist for ourselves can only foster the risk aversion that stifles our most important qualities and prevents us from accepting our human condition. It exacerbates the fragmented bittiness in which predatory relativists lure us toward gray losses, to wake up one day discovering we have not been for a very long time who we now only remember ourselves to be, and cannot discern who in fact has replaced us in our bodies and our lives. And maybe we secretly knew it was we all along who were the provocateurs of a movement who conspired in locking us in that oubliette. Or maybe this gives it all too much credit…
Ceausescu saboteur
Incentive structures and central bank largess which fostered the crypto industry made it perfectly suited for the kind of founders that pledge to deliver product across a grand course of strategy, but often never come up with anything. Military industrial complex laboratories are full of these personalities. Today, flogging the libertarian promise of self-sovereignty and decentralization becomes a more and more thinly veiled and cynical ruse to avoid the concession that little marketable value has been developed. Retreating into a tunnel for 7, 10, 15 years is a way of avoiding the stress founders feel when the market comes to contort all their precious, idealized work into what has the most utility for its own plebeian and luddite purposes. You can’t blame a founder for not wanting this! Yet, instead, crypto masquerades as global something that is fundamentally schizoid, never allowing the cognitive space to emerge when the “I” of the developer becomes subordinate to the “we” of the market. In doing so, it becomes more, not less, vulnerable to coopting by the state, and any attempt to diffuse governance over protocol development comes to be seen as Trotskyite subversion.
No wonder crypto development is geared to be avoidant of contact with the real world. Contact with the world is difficult. Marking to market one’s views with the reality of what the market will pay for is difficult in any business. It requires uncomfortable exposure and the risk that one’s precious cathedral will be quarried. Yet this is the cost of being alive in this world: the entrepreneur’s liver is always consumed by Zeus’ eagle. Crypto developers are no less subject to the fates.
That these firms end up in their own internal worlds is not only born out on the economic, intellectual and software development front, but within the composition of their managerial teams as well. With no customers to direct their laser-like loyalty and their founder’s abstract visions as their only client, teams of unqualified but nonetheless insular loyalists and excuse makers are retained as a synthetic version of a staff which pretend to understand the “grand strategy.” Professional managers who would refuse to go ten years with no revenue are eschewed. And worse, these staffs only rarely if ever share the founding ideology of individualist sovereignty in the first place. It is disillusioning to see that giving up their original philosophical raison-d’etre was not only inevitable but predictable. For the hopeful, this is a kind of bleak, childless, Milan Kundera-style resignation. Not that these projects are going nowhere, but that they never had any place to go.
Fecundity and family are as lacking as industrial “use cases.” Studying the quotients of “decentralization” in a crypto platform’s validation, rather than offering a product useful to flesh-and-blood markets in the here-and-now smacks of the manner in which leftist relativists justify their global schemes while shelves go bare, in which socialists in parlors debate on the fate of farmers and construction workers.
Maya Angelou said that only when one belongs to nothing are they free. The sense of belonging to this world and to all the Beauty in it, however, is different from belonging to a tribe, company or an ideological movement. The undergirding terror of relativism is that it is a wasteland of nihilism. With no cardinal internal virtue, disintegration and entropy and a further regression to brutalism, violence and mimetic, apelike consensus-hugging is the rule. Like a sci-fi alien, it is born pregnant, but pregnant with Leninism.
Early crypto developer / old whoring dirtbag Duchamp
In contrast to this tribalism, Bitcoin is one if not the only real source of human-to-human value in the ecosystem. Its watts and horsepower and cement and expensive computational power is its virtue. It is yoked to the real world. It is yoked to the cause of human productive purpose and our vulnerability to time. In another despondent irony, Bitcoin mining also may be the single economic activity which holds up the entire industry.
In the 1991 film with River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, lost boys squat in abandoned buildings making ends meet as street gigolos. My Own Private Idaho casts the American landscape as bisexual, pedophilic and dysphoric and like Duchamp takes a kind of macabre glee that all the world is a junkyard. One boy runs from his established father, one searches for his lost mother. When a stressful situation arises, one descends comically into narcolepsy. It mirrors that the failings of the cryptosphere are more failings of mental illness than malevolence.
The parochial American innocence of the years when Idaho was produced mirrors the throngs of today’s wide-eyed crypto buyers – the warm and trusting heartland always targeted into turning tricks for tokens. Whomever orchestrated the FTX heist read the landscape brilliantly, casting a front man in SBF most would think was autistic himself. The public seems to believe these types always know something they don’t. The whole complex flipped, at the speed of the internet, from American libertarianism to Czech postmodernism. Bereft of the muscularity of the market, it has collapsed in on itself to the bunker mentality of a waning Eastern Bloc dictator. And for all their horrifying torture and derangement, the last cult leaders of a relativist ideology, history still remembers them mostly as a short-lived sideshows. Nonetheless, the same ruthless, Ceausescu-style inversions of truthfulness and heartland values shown in Idaho, which have grown malignantly in the American body-politic since then, are mirrored in today’s politburo of crypto developers. If you meet one, don’t tempt her, her tribe will want her back for the self-immolating.
-RC