Hate right
I have come up with a new rule, and it is related to a topic nobody wants to talk about, for which I am already profoundly sorry. I promise the rest of this text is not really about the topic. What it is more about is ourselves and our reactions to things, and what those reactions tell us about the things we’re reacting to, and how the very groanworthy nouns I just mentioned are useful as mirrors around all of this.
I am also very strenously attempting not to inject my own personal views on the topic into this text, even though they are very strongly held, because again, the text is more about ourselves, and not quite so much about the topic at hand. I could just as easily come up with a topic that is similarly polarizing and end up on the other side of it. (As I write this, I am thinking of three.)
A brief history
It used to be that new technology would come out, and nobody would really truly care about it. They would learn some things about it, find something useful, and move on.
Let’s take a CD-ROM drive. Digital media is super useful! You can store more data on it. You can make cooler software with it. Nobody really went at CD-ROM drives, even though:
- The discs are made of plastic and hard to recycle
- The drives themselves were being made with rare metals; you couldn’t exactly put back in the earth once you were done with them
- The format kept getting obsoleted by itself, both in read/write speed and in burn/read capability
- For a long time, and in the vast majority of instances, you could not rewrite a CD. The rare exceptions had a finite rewrite capacity and high error rates
- CD-ROMs, and removable media in general, catalyzed an enormous wave of piracy, causing a major collapse in the music industry and major challenges in the software industry
Yet to the best of my knowledge, nobody went constantly protesting on the internet that CD-ROM drives were destroying the earth and end-running capitalism. We were just like “oh, CDs are here now.” There were also no passionate acolytes in favor of CDs, talking with religious fervor about how multimedia will save the earth. CDs appeared, some businesses made money off them, thumb drives & broadband happened, and now nobody really buys CDs anymore.
It is a monstrously false equivalency to assume that blockchain technologies should be equated with CDs. Yet why did we decide to imbue this with such faith? What are we hoping for? And why do people love or hate it so much?
The short answer
It should not be surprising to anyone that crypto was born out of the financial crisis, and it seems to have a “moment” anytime the world markets are more unstable than usual. People look to crypto as a way out from a system that has been rigged against them, or a low-risk way for the wealthy to amass more wealth in as short period.
Anyone who is telling you the following is probably lying:
- There are “legitimate” applications of crypto (e.g. smart contracts)
- Crypto/web3 is truly decentralized (it isn’t)
- Crypto/web3 is a cool thing for art (why not… just make art… like normal people do)
- Crypto is actually fine for the earth
I have not seen proof of any of these.
What crypto does definitely do includes:
- Making money
- Off people who lose money
- Buying contraband on the internet with a vague, incorrect veneer of security
I have seen proof of each of these.
Here are some reasons why people are very passionate about this new technology, along either pro or con:
- It possesses an extremely high market cap ($1.20T as of press time), especially when considered relative to regular markets
- It is rooted in faith, which comes in rather short supply in the tech industry
- It is zero-sum: in order to make money, you must take money from someone else
- It has a substantially higher ecological cost than e.g. CDs
- Our global consciousness has shifted towards a deeper consideration of the knock-on effects of new technologies, especially in the wake of populist fascism, institutional failure, and societal collapse
Technology critique is systems work
I am saying all of this to shed light on why the fight exists in the first place, and why it did not with technologies that might be perceived as “milder” or less nakedly coupled with the grim machinations of late capitalism.
This is useful because more technologies are going to be invented, and we need a useful framework for evaluating their systemic effects. We need to criticize new technological work with as much clarity, honestly, and rigor of proof as possible.
This has rarely been done in the past. Social networks were not viewed with much suspicion when they were first created. Twitter was treated with significant amounts of unconditional optimism for years after its invention. We viewed the whole internet as a way of creating global consciousness through earnest connection & creating repositories of universal information.
Technological optimism has died, and we’re a better society for it. It’s vitally important that we keep questioning new tools, because technology will only become more powerful, and potentially used for more harm.