Crypto tokens are not a means to destroy capitalism

Crypto tokens are indeed a form of predatory investment that may have wide-reaching consequences in the lives of people it harms. However it is not a means to accelerate the collapse of capitalism even if one subscribes to the accelerationism school of thought and believed this the acceleration of capitalism and its destruction was a good thing.

The crypto ideology is an extension of neoliberal project that aims to expand the scope and reach of markets to all aspects of human life, a concept often referred to as hyperfinancialization. Since crypto tokens aim to expand the scope of capitalism, they cannot bring about anything but more capitalism.

References

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  2. Cohney, Shaanan, David Hoffman, Jeremy Sklaroff, and David Wishnick. 2019. ‘Coin-Operated Capitalism’. Columbia Law Review 119 (3): 591–676.
  3. Golumbia, David. 2013a. ‘Cyberlibertarianism: The Extremist Foundations of “Digital Freedom.”’ Clemson University Department of English.
  4. ———. 2015. ‘Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism’. MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
  5. Stinchcombe, Kai. 2018. ‘Blockchain Is Not Only Crappy Technology but a Bad Vision for the Future’. Medium (blog). 9 April 2018. https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec.
  6. Brody, Ann, and Stéphane Couture. 2021. ‘Ideologies and Imaginaries in Blockchain Communities: The Case of Ethereum’. Canadian Journal of Communication 46 (3). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2021v46n3a3701.
  7. DuPont, Quinn. 2016. ‘The Politics of Cryptography: Bitcoin and the Ordering Machines’. Journal of Peer Production 1 (4): 1–23. http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DuPont_draft_submission.pdf.
  8. Hellegren, Z. Isadora. 2017. ‘A History of Crypto-Discourse: Encryption as a Site of Struggles to Define Internet Freedom’. Internet Histories 1 (4): 285–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1387466.
  9. Jarvis, Craig. 2021. ‘Cypherpunk Ideology: Objectives, Profiles, and Influences (1992–1998)’. Internet Histories, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1935547.
  10. Husain, Syed Omer, Alex Franklin, and Dirk Roep. 2020. ‘The Political Imaginaries of Blockchain Projects: Discerning the Expressions of an Emerging Ecosystem’. Sustainability Science, 1–16.
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