You use the term “culture war” a few times, but didn’t use the term “bro,” which is an interesting choice. How much of this rivalry would be the same if the technology was completely different (arguments about scarcity and power use moot) but the groups involved remain the same?
Stereotyped as a tool for cis-het-white-dudes, my guess is that crypto would never be treated as anything but a threat to the world of furries and other Tumblr/LJ style subcultures.
Discovered this article on the TechMeme Ride Home podcast and loved it so much that I created a substack account and got a paid subscription to Garbage Day. Gold.
Very much appreciate you thinking identifying and trying to think through the tension in the crypto-fication (and more broadly, financialization of the internet), although I end up with a different conclusion. While I agree that it's clear these things are on the horizon if capital has its way--even beyond crypto, the total enclosure of all online (and offline) spaces and relationships by powerful firms, embodiments of capital accumulation, has been an ongoing struggle with us on the losing side--I don't think that means we should feel compelled to accept self-cryptofication as a means of resistance.
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that, if you live at the margins of society, like many who participate in the porn industry do, crypto might present a way to circumvent state repression. The case of porn workers is likely the clearest case in favor of crypto as a means of resistance. However, I think the examples of the industry domination by MindGeek and the payment processor "strike" are actually revealing in the way that _any_ attempts at a hierarchical, market-based solution (which includes DAOs) have the same critical weaknesses that we need to address.
Capital will tend to accumulate in powerful actors who live in those nexuses of accumulation--for example, Facebook was in the right place and the right time, but it is a symptom of the greater structure of capital accumulation (even the particular ways in which it shapes the world can be attributed to larger tendencies in the development of capitalism). These powerful actors, from the state to firms like FB and Andreessen-Horowitz, like you identified, _will continue to exist_ unless we do something radical. What prevents them from entering these spaces we carve out for ourselves with crypto? Even if not directly through regulation or buyouts, these powerful actors still have indirect control over these smaller markets--the state mediates legal relations (like fraud prevention, property relations, and personal rights), the state and capital firms together control the systems of global production and finance, both of which we will still directly participate in.
Moving the mechanisms of control downward, from the state and existing financial institutions, to smaller organizations and software similarly moves the issues of trust and hierarchy downwards without resolving them and without critiquing or changing what's already repressing us.
We might argue there are technical solutions to prevent the "technology" part of decentralized technology from being captured by larger forces. However, the "decentralized" part requires the building of significant political and social will towards something different, something new. And if we are going to work to create that will anyways, why direct it towards recreating the same markets that make us suffer?
If you could organize enough, say, porn workers and producers to develop an alternative, "democratized" organization (leaving aside for now the real issues of whether such a thing is possible within an existing state system), you would have already generated a significant amount of political will, not simply because of the numbers, but because the process of organizing in and of itself transforms these workers and activates them politically. Organizing at that scale changes the fundamental calculus of what's possible, so why would we make things the same again?
None of this is to say that I think anyone who participates in these struggles and finds that crypto has some sort of use value for them in their own lives is _wrong_ or _immoral_. I am simply suggesting that, to face up to the impending domination of our lives, we need to take some significant first steps, steps which are radical and imaginative. Why let our ideas be determined by terms our dominators set?
"ur cat has no home training lol white people are fucking insane for acting like their the normal ones bc 'iTs tHe Cat's PaN NoW' like ur delusional and dumb"
god damn those stupid cat tweets did me psychic damage.
So how much of this NFT stuff is just that people want to own shit again? I mean is it just like vinyl and people buying sealed NES games?
You use the term “culture war” a few times, but didn’t use the term “bro,” which is an interesting choice. How much of this rivalry would be the same if the technology was completely different (arguments about scarcity and power use moot) but the groups involved remain the same?
Stereotyped as a tool for cis-het-white-dudes, my guess is that crypto would never be treated as anything but a threat to the world of furries and other Tumblr/LJ style subcultures.
Discovered this article on the TechMeme Ride Home podcast and loved it so much that I created a substack account and got a paid subscription to Garbage Day. Gold.
Very much appreciate you thinking identifying and trying to think through the tension in the crypto-fication (and more broadly, financialization of the internet), although I end up with a different conclusion. While I agree that it's clear these things are on the horizon if capital has its way--even beyond crypto, the total enclosure of all online (and offline) spaces and relationships by powerful firms, embodiments of capital accumulation, has been an ongoing struggle with us on the losing side--I don't think that means we should feel compelled to accept self-cryptofication as a means of resistance.
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that, if you live at the margins of society, like many who participate in the porn industry do, crypto might present a way to circumvent state repression. The case of porn workers is likely the clearest case in favor of crypto as a means of resistance. However, I think the examples of the industry domination by MindGeek and the payment processor "strike" are actually revealing in the way that _any_ attempts at a hierarchical, market-based solution (which includes DAOs) have the same critical weaknesses that we need to address.
Capital will tend to accumulate in powerful actors who live in those nexuses of accumulation--for example, Facebook was in the right place and the right time, but it is a symptom of the greater structure of capital accumulation (even the particular ways in which it shapes the world can be attributed to larger tendencies in the development of capitalism). These powerful actors, from the state to firms like FB and Andreessen-Horowitz, like you identified, _will continue to exist_ unless we do something radical. What prevents them from entering these spaces we carve out for ourselves with crypto? Even if not directly through regulation or buyouts, these powerful actors still have indirect control over these smaller markets--the state mediates legal relations (like fraud prevention, property relations, and personal rights), the state and capital firms together control the systems of global production and finance, both of which we will still directly participate in.
Moving the mechanisms of control downward, from the state and existing financial institutions, to smaller organizations and software similarly moves the issues of trust and hierarchy downwards without resolving them and without critiquing or changing what's already repressing us.
We might argue there are technical solutions to prevent the "technology" part of decentralized technology from being captured by larger forces. However, the "decentralized" part requires the building of significant political and social will towards something different, something new. And if we are going to work to create that will anyways, why direct it towards recreating the same markets that make us suffer?
If you could organize enough, say, porn workers and producers to develop an alternative, "democratized" organization (leaving aside for now the real issues of whether such a thing is possible within an existing state system), you would have already generated a significant amount of political will, not simply because of the numbers, but because the process of organizing in and of itself transforms these workers and activates them politically. Organizing at that scale changes the fundamental calculus of what's possible, so why would we make things the same again?
None of this is to say that I think anyone who participates in these struggles and finds that crypto has some sort of use value for them in their own lives is _wrong_ or _immoral_. I am simply suggesting that, to face up to the impending domination of our lives, we need to take some significant first steps, steps which are radical and imaginative. Why let our ideas be determined by terms our dominators set?
"ur cat has no home training lol white people are fucking insane for acting like their the normal ones bc 'iTs tHe Cat's PaN NoW' like ur delusional and dumb"
god damn those stupid cat tweets did me psychic damage.