Like most people, when I first encountered NFTs I thought they were a scam: a lot of grifters taking money from impressionable fiance bros, tech bros, and technofetishist by hyping up a worthless new application of a technology. After watching Line Goes Up a few months ago, I became convinced that NFTs were a vanguard of this current global wave of fascism. The primary drivers behind NFTs aren't grifters but instead capitalists, just not ultra wealthy capitalists. Near the end of the video, Olson refers to NFTs as a battle between the 5% and the 1%, a relationship primarily based on the capitalist response to the end of capitalism. The writing is on the wall for everyone who isn't in the Gates/Bezos level of owning the means of production, which includes smaller capitalists still larger than the petite bourgeois. These capitalists know this, and they resent it. They aren't mad about extreme inequality and rampant oppression, they're mad that will soon no longer be the oppressors. In a desperate bid to keep their material position over society, they turned to creating a system whose goal is the corporatization of everything, a system that's based on atomizing and exploiting every tiny aspect of our lives - and they dreamed themselves the rulers of this new system. Conflicts like this, where smaller capitalists are willing to turn to social upheaval in order to take power from larger capitalists are exactly how fascism begins. NFTs are an incredibly dumb grift, but at their core, their underlying ideology is geared towards the creation of a new fascist social order. Where christofascism and QAnon are the worker response to the end of capitalism, technofetishism (specifically NFTs, DAOs, the blockchain, and all the rest) is the capitalist response to the end of capitalism. They're two opposite, class specific manifestations of the advent of fascism.
Of course, the NFT and crypto markets have collapsed. While this is potentially a diffusing of the capitalist infighting that heralds fascism, I don't think this is the last we'll see of NFTs. As stated above, the very function of NFTs is to turn everything about a worker's life into a commodity. Capitalism naturally ends as it runs out of markets to exploit, causing it to increase the exploitation of existing markets and laborers to unsustainable levels. That creates the material conditions we're seeing now, which directly leads to anti-capitalist sentiment that fascists take advantage of. Fascism as an ideology is essentially a more overtly violent continuation of capitalism after its collapse. The reason this is relevant to a conversation on NFTs is that big market players recognize the need to find more markets to exploit. Not in a Marxist sense where they are aware of their own inevitable collapse, but rather just by following their natural systemic incentives to grow infinitely. NFTs are a dumb grift, and they were a complete failure due to a lack of systemic backing and omnipresent scams. But what if a company like Facebook built their own NFT infrastructure? If enough keystone capitalists decided to recreate the architecture of crypto exchanges and NFTs, they could actually succeed in using technology to create markets out of thin air. This was the end goal of the existing incarnation of NFTs, the players involved simply lacked the institutional power to force everyone to participate by being required to register your resume or lease as an NFT. Should they choose to rebuild these systems under their control, web3 would give large capitalists more markets to speculate on and exploit at the cost of ever decreasing material conditions for the working class. The final days of capitalism might include systems not entirely dissimilar to what web3 aims to be, just not controlled by the original designers.
It seems unlikely at this point that NFTs will herald fascism in the way that I initially worried, but that's not to say that web3 won't be a contributing factor. By contrast, the failure of web3 and the potential recreation of it by large capitalists will provide ample room to radicalize its former advocates. Crypto bros, often middle class white men, who have been financially harmed by NFTs and crypto while companies like Meta recreate the same structures they once participated in will likely feel indignant and cheated out wealth they believe should be theirs. From their perspective, if NFTs were a viable idea why then were they unable to profit off of them despite being in on the ground floor long before larger capitalists became involved? This sentiment will be easily exploited by fascist agitators who will argue that this is evidence "the elite" rig systems so that "the people" cannot succeed financially. From here we'll see the typical fascist pipelining and bending of a legitimate criticism of liberal capitalism into an argument in support of a more overtly violent form of capitalism.
NFTs represent an opportunity for capitalists to extend the lifespan of capitalism by atomizing the existence of workers in the name of ever increasing growth. Simultaneously, the failure of cryptocurrency and the likelihood of its revitalization by large capitalists offers a massive opportunity to radicalize those who initially bought into crypto as consumers - a group already rife with fascist ideology and economically primed by declining material privilege to side with fascism. In this sense NFTs represent a way for fascists to reach an entirely different demographic than those susceptible to christofascism and conspiracy, creating an even wider tent of reactionary ideology.
crypto/web3 and things like vr/ar/metaverse feel to me like the tech industry trying to recreate the mobile gold rush from like 2008-2012. Smartphone sales went from 0 to literally every person on the planet owning one. People in poor countries don't own computers but they own smartphones (or smart feature phones). That's done now, the technological advancement has slowed to a normal pace and now it's just regular revenue for the entrenched players. So there's this huge top-down push for shit that doesn't really make your life more convenient and it's obviously not going very well.
I don't think NFTs really reached any sort of critical mass outside of twitter blue checks. Bitcoin arguably has. But basically nothing else in that ecosystem matters. I actually don't think crypto crashing will lead to much of anything. The HODLers will continue to hold and the general public will lose interest until 2025 or whenever the next runup is. The powerful interests (that are in) already got in at lower than the current price, so they dont care. They've seen this 3 or 4 times before in the past 10 years.
I appreciate where you're coming from but I disagree. The difference as I see it is that NFTs don't just represent a new range of products but rather an entirely new way to make money of existing products, including products that aren't really products. Where something like VR is just another product to buy, the blockchain is a system which requires users to pay fees into the system in order to participate. The monkey JPGs or CS:GO skins aren't what's valuable about NFTs, it's the idea of creating non-fungible digital assets that itself has value. Instead of verifying you own this ape, what if you had to verify your lease via the blockchain? Meta can have a massive server that regulates the validity of the chain and make you pay them money for a contract you were already going to draft with a landlord by requiring it be verified on their chain. If you think the lease example is outrageous, imagine if Google required all of their Google certificate programs to be verified via their blockchain in order for them to hold meaning. Now professionals in all variety of fields are minting NFTs that Google gets a cut from all for certificates they would have gotten anyway. The true value of NFTs is that they can be leveraged to comodify existing under capitalism, no new products have to be created but rather a new market can be created out of existing products.
Additionally, while they're not populated by a massive number of people, NFTs aren't just a meme. There are a lot of people who have bought into NFTs or crypto, and while web3 isn't so popular as to be common, it's not just a restricted to twitter. There's whole ecosystems here, and all of them are filled with people ready to be radicalized by fascists.
There are lots of places where people are ready to be radicalized by fascists. The US empire and subsequently its vassal states are in active decay so we're naturally seeing more right-wing extremism. CAN crypto-bros be radicalized into fascism? Sure. But I'm not convinced that they exist in meaningful enough numbers that they will be a driving force here.
A more interesting supposition is that crypto might be widely used for funding militias.
I think a bit advantage technically is that it decouples technical integration from collaboration with company who maintains the chain. Increasingly centralized mining is obviously the way things have headed and the ability to not have to maintain a whole API surface in order for people to add products into your storefront is likely more valuable than some of us realize atm
No it doesn’t. It’s a hype thing for sure. The amount of conferences over the past years with a token “blockchain” session has been crazy. Like in completely unrelated fields
I wouldn't stop at how this kind of privatized legal system can be used at home. we should expect companies to pressure colonized nations to accept the legitimacy of, for instance, blockchain backed land registries, or contracts as you've already mentioned. in these subjugated markets, the state bends more readily to the whim of imperial capital and these more corrosive fascist privatization schemes can be hammered out, before as always they turn inward and return home.
I'm not sure if you were trying to reference this, but what you're talking about already exists for land in Latin America and the Caribbean. No clue how successful the venture was but they tried, which is terrifying.
While I'm at it, to give a more dystopic scenario where this would be used at home is if the US balkanizes or the strength of the federal government continues to be eroded. Arizona might functionally have a different set of laws than California in the near future, and something needs to sort out how information moves between those systems. Normally this is where a federal government would step in, but if that continues to operate with incompetence and be dismantled, you might start to see corporations step in to fill the role of information authentication across state lines.
I wasn't referencing anything in particular, just where my brain went when I realized what ethereum was a couple of years ago,what "smart contract" actually meant. I'm horrified, if unsurprised to learn that I was right.
While I’m at it, to give a more dystopic scenario where this would be used at home is if the US balkanizes
if the US balkanizes, we're fighting a war for local/regional control. real left factions will have the opportunity to win popular support because the liberals will have completely and visibly failed in a rather final way. technofascism won't be guaranteed to win that war and establish social and legal hegemony. I'm not saying it's a rosy path but this way lays one of our largest opportunities. a dystopia is possible but... we can't plan to fail to seize every opportunity that lands in our lap.
I go on about this every few months but NFTs have their roots in a goal proposed by Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns The Future? whereby the tech companies intend to undermine the fight for privacy and against data collection by tokenizing everything we do online and then offering us a monetary pittance for the use of our data. He naively envisions a world where we all make our living by managing who is allowed to use our data rather than the obvious and current precident of us being forced to mark a check box where we have to surrender our rights in order to use a service that society forces us to need.
I think crypto-aligned folks are into the privatization of space for similar reasons. If capitalism makes it into space we may be stuck with it until we get to the edge of the solar system. Interstellar travel is a trial I don't think capitalism can survive, which is why they always imagine wormholes bending space to bring new markets physically closer to them.
There's also a bit of climate change avoidance in the space exploration stuff as well. I personally see the end goal of that as creating an automated orbital society of luxury for the rich and pmc while the poors are left on Earth to burn and choke. I don't think they'll pull it off, they should have gone all in on space exploration half a century ago if that was the plan, but I think it's part of what they're trying
That and China is quickly starting to outpace NASA. If they get to the Aitken Basin first they'll basically win the second space race regardless of how much catching up Bezos and Musk do.
Musk (and Bezos) are running their companies primarily to grift public funds so there's no chance they catch up
wormholes might do that but pretty sure there's no interstellar anything with respect to our lifetimes unless you cheat at physics so putting that on SF seems like a stretch.
Yeah, my point is that interstellar travel is going to necessitate some form of collectivization. Capitalists dream of cheating that to allow individualism to continue, but it seems to me that it's a literal pipe dream.
Somewhere in the back, the peanut gallery shouts, “build dual power”
yo, you might not know, but 'peanut gallery' is a historically racial term w origins in the segregated south. peep the slurs on the wiki page :/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_gallery
I find it unlikely that anyone would be able to estabilish web3 as it's currently envisioned. It might be a desperate bid for new markets, but I can't imagine the slow speeds and wildly fluctuating costs not crippling regular economic activity.
Maybe if they ditched the blockchain tech and only kept the finacialization aspect? But the tech mumbo jumbo serves an important purpose in obfuscating web3's actual purpose, so anyone wanting to make it happen would have to work out a new way to sell it to people. Silicon Valley is having a serious problem in general selling the public a believable, positive version of the future (apart from :melon-musk: and his bazinga brigade)
The NFT bros are primed for some fash shit for sure though. Not remotely as scary as christofash (which are already chomping at the bit for some mass violence) but still a problem.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm under the impression that you could circumvent a lot of the fluctuating costs and long wait times by centralizing the chain. If massive companies were to get involved the goal wouldn't be the technolibertarian nonsense about defeating muh state through blockchains, but rather using the chain as a way to make new markets entirely controlled by individual conglomerates or megacorps.
If nothing else, you can ditch the chain entirely for a "chain in spirit" where a company like Google requires you to verify things like your college diploma or your lease through a profile they have on you, with you paying a fee to have each relevant document authenticated
You can use structures like Merkle Trees to layer small chains into higher authority chains (hierarchies bby). If google/the govt/etc owns a majority stake in the top chain it can effectively control the network while saving significantly on resources by not having to process all the subchains constantly.
In fact AT&T already researched this (pdf).
I hate how interesting this is because it all amounts to a bunch of smart people figuring out how to more effectively financialize everything instead of figuring out how to more equitably distribute food or whatever
Based on descriptions of the Digital Yuan I think it might use a similar tree structure to put the Chinese central bank at the top.
As for the thing you're talking about, it would be neat if an Amazon-like global ERP were used in the same manner as project Cybersyn. We have the infrastructure and software, it would just need to be tweaked slightly to not prioritize capitalist profit/growth.
Do you have any reading on the digital Yuan beyond just googling?
And yeah ideally a big target for modern socialist movements to seize would be logistics companies. Places with fleets of boats and rows of server racks dedicated to making that travel more efficient
I legit have no idea, DDG was pretty useless. You might have to know enough Chinese to look it up on Baidu.
Whelp that’s a wall for me unfortunately. Do you speak Chinese?
If nothing else, you can ditch the chain entirely for a “chain in spirit” where a company like Google requires you to verify things like your college diploma or your lease through a profile they have on you, with you paying a fee to have each relevant document authenticated
Yeah this is more likely. My hope is that in the event this happens, it is so ghoulish that people would disengage/look for alternatives/tell Google to go fuck themselves.
Great post thank you.
Do you believe this 5% vs 1% feud can be exploited by the working class, or is the working class impact on these disputes too remote?
Depends on what you mean. Generally, we can't exploit the feud between the 5% and 1% beyond taking action while they're fighting, but that was the plan anyway. Fascism is in part based on that conflict within capital, and since that occurs when capitalism is dying the working class should already be trying to take advantage of that.
In this case specifically, while we can vote with our wallets now by just not using NFTs, if we exist a world where Google is authenticating documents that you have to use anyway there wouldn't be much we could do. Like having to pay high rent right now, if the systems I worry could be implemented are actually implemented, we would likely have no choice but to participate.
Community networks having control in local government can do a lot more than people think too. If a local rotary member rallies hard enough against local businesses accepting crypto for payment, for example, that could push back the progression of crypto in that community for a solid decade. Workers can and should create networks of similar influence
The way we impact it is by disconnecting. The pyramid schemes require a low-level userbase to invest and have their funds funneled upward. By disinvesting you collapse the market. In this case voting with your wallet actually works.
This all makes a lot of sense.
My impression of "Web3" was just that it's "blockchain everything" but the concept itself is so stupid that I haven't been able to wrap my head around it beyond that — do you have some sense of what it purports to be, what it actually is, and what the implications are for the internet at large? Doesn't need to be thorough. Just trying to decide if I should learn more about it and/or if it's necessary/valuable/possible to try to sabotage web3 before it takes off much
If you haven't already seen it, I really recommend Line Goes Up for a general overview on Web3 stuff. What Web3 proports to be is the libertarian, techbro solution to the neoliberal financial system and the consolidation of the internet by companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. It completely fails in all these aims, creating an ecosystem which compounds the wealth of individuals rich enough to be close to capital or small time capitalists but not those like Bezos or Buffett. It also created a decentralized ecosystem which immediately centralized to solve problems stemming from decentralization, so it failed at that too. If you want more technical details on how exactly they fail at those aspect, I'd again recommend the video I linked. Dan Olson is at best a succdem, but the video does a good job making it easy to understand the mechanics of Web3 and laying a foundation for disucssions around it.
The implications for the internet at large are very minor with the potential to be major in the right circumstances. As of now, crypto and NFTs are crashing since they have no real use value and the bubble has seemingly popped. The real value of NFTs is their potential to comodiy your existence, not what they're like now. Everything that you have a document on from contracts with landlords to government paperwork can be turned into a digital object which needs to be verified to a capitalist with money. The techbro who founded etherium doesn't have the systemic influence to begin building towards a system like that, so the NFTs we got were shit like monkey JPG profile pictures or video game assets. If a ton of corporations with actual power like your bank, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all got together and made a similar system they could conceivably force everyone to participate instead of NFTs being loser finance bros buying garbage. The implications of that are staggering, but that's if big capitalists decide to use this sort of infrastructure to stretch worker exploration as far as they can. In a situation like that, you wouldn't really need a dedicated blockchain, you could just take the spirit of a central authenticator that requires you to pay to authenticate things and go from there.
As of now, there's no need to stop web3. It stopped itself more or less, and the existing players will likely get less and less relevant as time goes on. As long as you don't buy crypto or mint NFTs you're helping kill Web3. Bit if that systemic implication I mentioned earlier were to happen, you likely couldn't opt out for the same way you can't opt out of other worker exploitation. There's no guarantees that'll happen, but with companies like Facebook getting into this space, it doesn't seem impossible.
Ah cool thanks for the detailed write up and the video rec!
Main reason I asked about helping to kill it is cause I'm a software engineer and recently browsed through a shitload of job listings for web3 startups/grifts/etc and know that if it were helpful or socially necessary I could easily get hired at those places and cause problems on purpose. Definitely less soul sucking not to though lol, especially since they're just small potatoes and it sounds like doing that would clear the way for the bigger players even more
Based as fuck that your mind immediately went to sabotaging development from the inside. That's fucking awesome comrade. As it currently stands, I wouldn't waste your mental health on it. Unless you think you can do some damage that would set a project back by years and you get an offer from Facebook or Google, you'd be fucking with little fish in a little pond that's likely to dry up soon. Also, they probably won't pay your wages when the CEO runs off with all the money after the rug pull. At this point the potential uses of the technology have been demonstrated if big players in the tech or financial sector are interested. Destroying some bullshit memecoin company won't help us too much, none of the players on the board right now will be involved in this hypothetical future scenario. Especially considering how good a job they do at destroying themselves without outside help, I'd focus your energy and labor on other areas.
