Crypto’s Crypto is Coordination not Currency
The slate of scandals and failures in the crypto community world over 2022 are regular front-page stories across legacy news and viral on social media. In this environment, the most common refrain is ‘regulation’, though what exactly that regulation looks like is up for grabs. I am not arguing that there shouldn’t be revised governance toward and within crypto, nor that we should embrace modified conservative market-led proposals for fixing problems (after all, so often, it is exactly these privatisation models that have helped lead us into the dystopic scenes we live today). What I want to briefly suggest, though, is that the current US approach to crypto is misguided on philosophical grounds. First, because blank check surveillance is always bad and especially when dealing w/ social communication. And second, because framing social communication in strict financial terms robs it (like all expression) of its actual potential.
Right now, a lot of more ‘left’ leaning colleagues/experts are generally anti-crypto in ways that 1/ reduce it to market/money terms, and 2/ minimise the importance of privacy from government surveillance to preserve personal/community expression. While the hunt for liquidity and profit is a significant driver in crypto, the community and technology are not fundamentally based in this vibe — rather it is an offshoot of more systemic geo-economic dynamics. At its most innovative, crypto represents transformative possibilities for distributed, privacy respecting communication and coordination. The real prize is not crypto’s potential as decentralized private money (to the extent private money will exist, it will most likely be monopolized by large telecommunication entities) but that it suggests a new infrastructure of communication and an expert class devoted to its development. If one lives with privilege in a society, the concern with surveillance of that communication is perhaps less pronounced. But for much of the world and much of history, a healthy anti-authoritarianism wary of surveillance is a friend of freedom, progress and well-being. Framing crypto as a money fight requiring legacy arrangements to step in and take over is too big brother, too neoliberal.
On the non-left, colleagues are often ‘anti-centralisation’ and anti-regulation. They forget that there is always already background institutional rules (markets aren’t ‘natural’) and that centralisation isn’t a fact, but a characterisation in that you can always describe something as decen/centr depending on whether zoom in or out (much like ‘time’ being long or short), and even if we could approximate it. Nor does decentralisation result in transcending hierarchy. To fragment authority and set practices means you need standardisation to achieve efficiencies, and standardisation means over time cutting down on innovation and usually being captured by concentrated power or at least its logic. In other words, it doesn’t avoid the problem, it just shifts the terrain a bit. Out with the old boss, in with the same-ish boss.
The point here, is that whatever position one has, the point is we should consider shifting away from tired debates championing ‘the markets’ or ‘the state’ since these are largely metaphysical/rhetorical terms that can be flipped around endlessly and captured politically. To speak of a state as a fixed entity is to ignore its messy porous boundaries, replete with public-private arrangements, acrimonious stakeholder interests and warring administrative processes across local, regional and global terrains. To speak of a market as if existing outside politics is to pretend that its arrangements reflect legal regimes (e.g., contracts, property) formalising polity/political decisions — changing a background law can change a business model that can shift cultural behaviors and market reasoning. And often, the struggles seem to be less about actual politics or analytical clarity, and more people getting caught up in some sort of culture war with based on stylistic/rhetorical/experiential comfort zones.
In the wake of crypto scandals and failures (with more likely on the horizon), there is going to be increasing calls for regulation and for demands to see what are the benefits and use cases of crypto activity. The opportunity being lost right now, I think, is for crypto architects and progressive non-crypto communities to work together to ensure the next generation social coordination ecosystems will remain privacy respecting for all and not allow these opportunities to be defined simply in terms of policing/criminality or marketisation.
