Continuing the discussion from GitCoin, "Quadratic Funding", crypto-Web3-DAO etc vs Snowdrift and crowdmatching and from On the fundamental tensions around money and its place in society:
This article/interview I just read really is key to what I’d been seeking: a perspective that makes sense of the shifts in economic trends: Crypto, the Left, and Techno-Feudalism | Yanis Varoufakis & Evgeny Morozov in dialogue - mέta
A little snippet (it’s a long read, but worthwhile):
In the name of liberating us from moguls, states, and even climate change, crypto zealots are turbocharging the ideology of commodification
The following are my mostly-unedited short reflections after reading it:
I have read and heard from Yanis Varoufakis before and have appreciated deeply most anything he has to say. I had made note of his work with Valve in the past and noted something about their published documents about their internal team policies as something to read. I only now recognize how his work with Valve and early dynamics of in-game economics spilling into the “real” world brought him remarkable perspective. This is the informed, nuanced non-reactionary critical take I was looking for.
Blockchain has deeply important value just as all sorts of technological innovation has value. But it cannot itself address the political systems. The enthusiasts are not questioning the core nature of the problems. The problem is in the whole premise that we need scarcity and exclusivity as our economic foundations. Cryptocurrencies don’t get us out of that flawed premise.
I won’t rehash the whole article here. Suffice to say, it’s fascinating to see the shifts and ideas being pushed around still. And we have to grapple with them and their noise as we engage in the world in which we now find ourselves.
The solutions we actual need must focus on developing social and political patterns, ideas about how people coordinate and cooperate. And within that, we need the capacity to engage adaptively with our economic tools. We must avoid a scenario in which we work to achieve democratic human processes only to be incapable of democratically managing economic technologies because of the locked-in tech design of the system. We can only have democracy if people are able to democratically change the rules of the game.
Where does this leave us? I think any project inextricably tied to cryptocurrency is a long-term dead-end, but how long, I don’t know, maybe long enough that it will stay extremely hard to convince people of it. Blockchain technology will stay around and be useful, it’s just not a panacea and not going to necessarily go where we want to go. Projects that incidentally use cryptocurrency are more interesting if aspects of their work are independently interesting. Maybe the social/political ideas from the cryptocurrency world will also have huge impacts on the outside world, but the most prominent today are simply those being exploited by standard entities (e.g. Paypal and CashApp now hyping cryptocurrency and pushing users to buy it through them). Anyone who thought it would be or necessarily will be any different has been delusional.
The remarks in the article about how China is really being smart and actually taking a holistic combination of steps to retain political autonomy and keep financialization at bay… that’s fascinating. The future of fiat currencies freed from private banking is a prospect with huge potential impact. That’s a viable revolutionary direction which is fully compatible with (but not necessarily getting us to) the world we envision.
