Blockchain ideology

In 2017 Verso published a book by Adam Greenfield called Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Last month I found an essay online in which he published a section that he said he had “always regretted leaving out. I think it would have made the book’s critique of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies much sharper”.

The section begins like this:

Bitcoin didn’t just arrive on Earth from nowhere, as though suddenly phased in from some mathic hyperspace of pure abstraction. It landed in a culture medium that in many ways was already primed to be receptive to arguments about the dynamism of the market, the meddlesomeness of regulators and the sheer hapless inefficacy of government. After four decades of neoliberal hegemony, during which the hostility toward the possibilities of government expressed in California’s Proposition 13 tax revolt of 1978 became all but universal in the power centers of the West, these are hardly controversial positions.
…
The blockchain was proposed by someone or -ones who chose to veil themselves behind a cloak of pseudonymity, in the context of a distinct human subculture that placed great value on that pseudonymity, and understood it in a very particular way. If we want to know more about the values embedded in the Bitcoin protocol, it’s helpful to understand just a little bit about the milieu Satoshi emerged from, regardless of who he actually is or was — even if “Satoshi” turns out to have been a project of the NSA, as some of the more conspiracy-minded observers of the Bitcoin phenomenon continue to maintain. What do the people responsible for the development of cryptocurrency believe, specifically? What cause or causes are they trying to advance in their work?

If you have any interest in this at all, you will find the complete essay well worth reading. You can find it at Adam Greenfield’s Patreon.

But you had already guessed that.