Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
The part where you said “people interpreting regulations and codes” is really, really important, and I don’t think you quite understand why. This is where the advocates of DAOs and smart contracts constantly trip up; they think that the interpretation of law is a failure, and not a feature.
This is exactly why we don’t allow police officers to judge guilt and assign sentences. It’s why we have an adversarial court system; because no law can ever perfectly encapsulate all of its own implications. Laws will, inevitably, need to be interpreted at some point in time, because sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that could not possibly have been envisioned when the law was written.
This is why you cannot programmatically enforce regulations and contracts. There must be room for interpretation for any community or society to be able to act in a manner that is truly equitable and just, because - inevitably - most often the least imagined scenarios will involve the most marginalized members of that community.
I mean we don’t disagree on the idea that we need flexibility and the ability to allow for remidiation even in the face of uncertainty.
Its just that I think that where we can be certain we should be. If we can be certain that we want officials that are accountable to the people, we should be.
There is tremendous value in this beyond what is made possible by DAOs. For example many people prefer the set price system set by stores both owners and customers as compared to haggling and bartering for every exchange.
The adversial court system, I personally think, is a great institution but it is very expensive to operate in so the default is too avoid using as much as possible. Its good to have if you need it, and we as a society do need it, but most administrivia doesn’t and shouldn’t be done there.