Last year, leftist culture writer Hussain Keswani argued in an article titled “The Leftists Should Talk About Cryptocurrencies” that Web3 and Ethereum-adjacent cryptocurrencies will “essentially” change the world – for good or for bad. . As such, he said, it was up to the Left to retrieve technology from liberals and anarchy-capitalists imposing socialist terms and ideals. Such investors include crypto influencer Lee Jin, who, despite being a venture capitalist, claims to be a student of Marx and tweeted Last year the DAOs were the “next step in the labor movement”.
As you can imagine, the Left detests this sort of thing.
In his article, Keshwani called on the left to come up with crypto fundamentals to make a more compelling case than VCs. “I believe that visualizing different futures requires some understanding of crypto and blockchain technologies,” Keswani wrote. “Not only for functional reasons, but also for questioning the language and terms of context in which the new Internet is being built.”
As Web3 gained a boom in mainstream attention, it all went all out, with some cracks emerging on the left—that is, among the old-school, strictly anti-capitalist left—what cryptocurrencies as a technology purpose. are suitable or not. Many of the old-fashioned thinkers who have recently discovered Web3, dismissed it as a kind of endgame financialization of everything, an expression of a rent-seeking class that would impose a market price on oxygen molecules, Even if it is wrapped in language of cooperative and equality. Others, however, took a more compromising approach to the reality of scams and greed and all of them, viewing things like the DAO with hope.
There has also been debate within Ethereum and its surrounding communities as to whether the ideology They membership is also Unknowingly Leftist – Although the followers of Ethereum in spirit are much more leftist than the hard-libertarian bitcoin clan, and have written numerous articles on good governance and fair distribution of wealth, they are not always happy to identify themselves with “socialism” and are not strictly aligned with the classical left.
‘Simple enough, crap’
Negative coverage can be found most prominently in the Marxist stalwart Jacobin, who at first did his best to ignore Web3 (which I would lazily use interchangeably with “crypto”) and since then in the industry. is considered somewhat irritating but necessary to counter. In the past months it has specifically focused on deflating glib talking points about crypto “democratic money”, and argued in an article, “utopian rhetoric about freedom, decentralization and the economy owned by investors”. But at its core, it’s a way to sell a new generation of products to the masses.”
Similarly, a more recent controversy lamented the deluge of “crypto snake oil” in the football (soccer) world, specifically those “fan tokens” to give a “voice” to fans, but in fact Let’s monetize ephemeral bullshit like stickers and “Victory Songs”. Another dismissed the notion that NFTs could benefit creators, spurred on by the hype of funds to sustain them as a betrayal of a post-pandemic opportunity to better distribute funds. “NFTs,” the magazine was indignant, “are, quite simply, bullshit.”
On the surface, it is understandable for the Left to instinctively hate cryptocurrency in all its forms. What else, they ask, is blockchain technology, but a mechanism to extend the reach of harmful mass capitalism into every depth and yet unmonetised reach of modern life? Marx’s prevailing hostility was towards capitalism’s misallocation of capital and the extraction of mindless profit for profit – what is more a concession to bourgeois greed than the underlying technology dog coin? “User-owned” as in, say, Ethereum mining, they would add, is misleading: the workers do not actually hold the levers of the industry, but strings of digits and jpegs of cats.
Also, half of it is controlled by the VCs.
“I think it’s very fake and hurtful,” Jacobin editor David Broder told me. “Like I can’t see how it has any social use.”
Such sentiment has been echoed far and wide, especially in a widely researched two-hour-long YouTube video on NFTs released last month by the channel Folding Ideas. There has also been endless criticism from the centre-left, who would say “milktoast weight centrist” more than a sign of left-handed contempt. These are the critics who largely ignored the social issues inherent in the design of Web3 and focused on the least-common-denominator environmental criticisms (a single NFT traded similar to Norway/Peru/Turkmenistan/Tatooine/ Uses up.[insert middling-GDP regional power here]) and as for specific conspiracy theories as a whole, I don’t know, bored apes are subliminal Nazi propaganda.
‘Good, hopeful people’
Elsewhere on the left, however, people have embraced at least aspects of the technology, if often from a watchful distance, aiming not to ignore its many shortcomings. Some argue that the technology, with its anti-incumbency potential, distrust of big banks and focus on democratic ownership of online platforms, creates a natural, if not entirely trustworthy, bedfellow for the Left.
For example, left-wing tech writers Ali Breland and Max Reid have both observed that investing in cryptocurrencies is as viable a strategy to make money in a wildly uneven modern economy; That is, if investment bankers are supposed to be able to pull out pesky sums of money out of practical thin air, why shouldn’t everyone else get in on the grift? But this is not so much an argument in favor of crypto as a concession to its strategic sense. is there really someone on the left like crypto?
The most promising leftist discourse in favor of crypto revolves around the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). DAOs are basically generic enterprises accessible to holders of certain crypto tokens – who also enjoy voting rights on a type of treasury – and there has been a lot of talk on the left about their potential (and, as we saw). , VC click). You know, liberate the man who works.
Among the many left-leaning DAO advocates (even as Jacobin pronounces them “interesting,” with the inevitable caveat) is Austin Robbie. The Robi platform has been heavily involved with the movement of cooperatives, user-owned digital services, and a Recent Articles He argued that the DAO token-model could be a useful tool for these cooperatives as they seek efficiency and scale. Similarly, DAOs can learn from traditional cooperatives how to avoid their common pitfalls, such as the unequal distribution of token-money (and votes), self-serving “communities” and the tendency to deteriorate very quickly into unpleasant investments, he added. . Flashmobs, to name a few.
Robbie isn’t surprised to see other leftists trash crypto on environmental and social grounds, and he often agrees. “But if you’re interested in cooperatives, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be interested in DAOs,” he said. “We need good, hopeful people to try and reinvent these technologies for the better, and not give tools to people we disagree with.”
Robbie takes the controversial issue of NFTs as another example. “I’ve seen a lot of people get hooked on NFTs, like mixing them with an environmental impact lens with crypto art on specific networks,” Robbie said. “They don’t realize that NFTs are like a general-purpose computing primitive. They aren’t necessarily just ugly art made by annoying people; they may represent membership, a platformless form of membership that lets you get away with corporate tech.” gives freedom from monopoly.”
He added that crypto is “not about financial speculation, treating everything like a stock market”. “I want to capture social value.”
Interestingly, Amin Suleimani, the inventor of MolochDAO, which was the blueprint for many DAOs today and arguably the reason for their revival, is highly anti-socialist. I asked him recently about this and he boasted a bit: socialism is authoritarian, the state monopolizes violence, it stifles freedom and is “impossible” to practice without coercion.
For Soleimani, the DAO is like an ideology-agnostic, post-capitalist tool for coordination. “It’s bigger than capitalism,” he said in an interview. “The DAO stuff is politically neutral, it’s like coordination maximalism. We don’t care about the brand of political ideology you want to pursue. We care about how effectively humans work together.” can.”
To illustrate this point Soleimani cited the origins of the cyberpunk movement, which began, he said, when cryptographers took military-grade encryption technology and passed it on to individuals, so that they could “create a survey without the risk of being surveyed.” to communicate with others.” It is a philosophy of pure freedom, as much capitalist as it is capitalist.
Still, like it or not, much of what Soleimani supports aligns perfectly with socialism, albeit with a lesser-known variety: liberal socialism, the idea that you have top-down corporations instead of top-down corporations. There may be millions of semi-competitive employee-owned cooperatives. Which sounds like a little DAO!
The dao-as-cooperative argument may sound familiar, as it was the same one put forth by Li Jin, and it is strange to see leftists coming to the same conclusions as venture capitalists. This is why some have outright dismissed technology (and its accompanying philosophy of user-worker emancipation) as a kind of fraudulent appropriation. That’s what inspired me last year TweetPretending, in response to an optimistic leftist, “really” [DAOs] act as an investment group. It is less socialism than it is a form of steroidal mass capitalism, in which everyone is a shareholder. This tweet got an overwhelming response from my followers: two likes.
Yet soon after, I got a response from a guy named Matt Dryhurst, co-host of the left-leaning tech podcast Interdependence and one of the more daring thinkers on the liberating potential of blockchain. Dryhurst took issue with my suggestion that DAOs—and expansions—were purely tools for crypto-capitalists, and presented an interesting argument. “What I find most interesting and promising about crypto is the new demands and unintentional alliances being made,” he said. “Not perfect, but give me VCs idealizing democratic protocol ownership on good leftist demands without a viable roadmap.”
what do you think! In a way, Dryhurst was expressing the classical socialist idea that the technological foundations laid down by capitalism would be under workers’ heaven. And if crypto makes it profitable to create something left-oriented, like cooperatives, then VCs like Lee Jin are, unsurprisingly, aligned with class struggle. It’s the Marxist trope about the capitalist selling you the rope with which to hang him – but in this case it’s Andreessen Horowitz, who is selling you a speculative DAO token.
https://decrypt.co/93428/karl-marx-crypto
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