A feather is all it takes to die laughing
Welcome to the Real Life weekly newsletter and thanks for reading. It's 2022, and we're looking forward to another year of pumping crypto nonstop. We're all going to make it. Just ask the people of Kazakhstan, where nearly one-fifth of the world's bitcoin mining takes place (thanks to its coal) and where rising energy prices have led to violent protests and state repression. It's the first bitcoin revolution! We can look forward to something complementary occurring in the U.S. when bitcoin crashes and crypto bros move into their brownshirt phase, as Hamilton Nolan suggests will happen in this piece:
Here is what will happen when hundreds of thousands of younger investors are smashed by the crypto crash: They will be radicalized. This will not be experienced as simply a decline in prices, because crypto represents much more than a simple investment to its most fervent adherents — it represents a way out of the American trap.
It's clear that after many years, crypto is finally finding its use case, political destabilization and fascist radicalization. This was always the ambition, as David Golumbia's 2016 book The Politics of Bitcoin argues, but the world seems as though it is more ready. If not now, then perhaps after a few more ineptly managed pandemic waves soften the population up a bit more and convince them there are no collective protections (least of all from a financial regulatory standpoint but not even from a biopolitical standpoint), no possible coordinated social efforts, no sustainable structures of mutual aid or even medical care that can be dreamed of, and that there is nothing for it but to join the pack of crypto grifters before they are forced to turn openly cannibalistic.
The recent film Don't Look Up was excruciating to watch and deeply incoherent (maybe by design if that is even conceptually possible), but it captured well the bleak condition of a world that has allowed crypto to happen — one whose networks and structures and ideological stalemates have facilitated the invention of a technology that is as politically, environmentally, socially, and personally destructive as could be imagined, that is indeed specifically optimized to persistently maximize the damage on each of those levels. What if we could liberate capitalism from its sociopolitical embeddedness and allowed it to fully metastasize? What if we unleashed a plague of trustlessness on the world? Crypto is the comet, and it's probably too late to avert the impact.