The real money cannot be owned by Musk
California, Capital, "Crypto"-something, the Simulation is So Predictable
Better be careful not to buy a social media platform by accident, lest you also go insane, eh? And yet, if anything at all can be said about Musk's helmsmanship of Twitter, it is simply that it has been predictable. American discourse, possessed of memetic tentacles spread far and wide, is consumed with billionaire-gazing, but if the pageclick-driving emotion is jealousy, it would be better replaced with pity, and if it is concern, it would be better replaced with an impersonal lens, for the selection factors driving dollar measures select, unsurprisingly, for the personification of Capital, and the selection pressure is brutal enough to ensure little else makes it through. Consciously, or otherwise, Musk, or some remaining-but-now-unleashed C-suite MBA-type, has recognised that Twitter's possession of value is not the brand, not the Tweets, not the algorithms, not the engineers, not even the (now-in-default?) San Francisco office space, but rather the graph of somewhat-transitive web-of-trust data created by the free choice of Twitter users, and they have decided that they'll be better off by severing the ties which allow this graph to Venn-diagram-itself to and around the rest of the internet. In the long term, they're wrong, in the short term, I don't know, but either way such change is merely the expedition of the inevitable, so perhaps we should expedite it further and save ourselves the time.
Such myopia, sadly, is not limited to California boardrooms or wannabe Orwellians. Technologists of the crypto-world have, by and large, let themselves be captured by Capital in exchange for fast-flowing fiat moolah, with the predictable result that, apart from insiders, the European anarchists who are paying attention (as opposed to the American ones who are mostly LARPing), mercenary technologists, and finance bros who haven't yet left for Sam Altman's new promised land of ChatGPT, everyone else, including both mainstream America (who matter insofar as they change the acceptably-Orwellian-window for itchy legislators), and serious people, think crypto is garbage. Last year, when I lived in Neukolln and biked past "NasaDogeCoin: The Future of Finance" ads (no, really), it was difficult to contest them. Now, I've moved, and ignorance is bliss, but the discourse remains stuck treading water. Such eddies in the currents of language, of course, average out when you pull back the telephoto lens of time — but just think of the cycles of collective consciousness which could be saved if we just, like, didn't.
Money, the accounting system which we use to coordinate the division of labour, has diverged, even inverted, from trust, which is, approximately, why dystopia appears to be rapidly approaching in the rearview mirror, careening left and right whilst spewing toxic fumes which would halt the truck itself if there was anyone living at the wheel, which there isn't. Crypto, by and large, refuses to reckon with this, perhaps because "building a better accounting system" just sounds incredibly, defeatingly unsexy, and because the unholy conjunction of Excel spreadsheets and AbstractBankAccountInstantiationFactory Java class inheritance which "accounting" conjures up in the mind is exactly what anyone who studied programming not solely as FAANG interview prep but even in part because elegant abstraction is beautiful wanted to avoid ever thinking about. Fine, call it something else — regenerative finance, collaborative finance, retroactive public-goods funding. The terms don't matter, but the theory does — money as end is fetish, not foundation; money as means means that you'd better have an idea of what it is a means to and why another means might mean an improvement. Contemporary economics isn't offering anything compelling, and its successful subterfuge of claiming to be a Science having captured ailing institutions already happy to outsource Decisions of Substance is no small part of why we're all in this mess. Nothing to be found in the Hallowed Halls of Incumbent Institutions, so it's up to us, i.e. anyone Paying Attention. No time like the present.
Luckily, in our Quest for Moderately Functional Money, it appears that we already have an ally from on mathematical high, but one so far mostly misunderstood. I shan't have time to delve in today, so consider that your Subscription Teaser for Next Time.