Why does the left hate crypto so much?

vimothy

yurp
re, the op, I think the left hates crypto bc its identified with the alt-right, tech bros, etc, and not bc it has a substantive critique of the tech or the institutions surrounding it, about which it's largely uninterested.
 

vimothy

yurp
its analogous to the question of why the left is so supportive of lockdowns and covid policy in general. it's not really about the merits of the case, it's more about how the issue falls across the partisan divide. and ofc you could say the same thing for the right, but with the polarity flipped.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
strange timing - first, the anti crypto letter from the old farts, and now a 'dying hacker' threatens to release 1.37 gb of scraped telegram messages revealing crypto bros nefarious schemes - assassinations, murder, Epstein style badness.... some twisted fantasy going on here ( edit: I suspect that 'adyingnobody' will succumb to their imaginary terminal illness before the 15th June )


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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"Why does the left hate crypto so much?"


Jesse Powell, a founder and the chief executive of Kraken, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, recently asked his employees, “If you can identify as a sex, can you identify as a race or ethnicity?”
He also questioned their use of preferred pronouns and led a discussion about “who can refer to another person as the N word.”
And he told workers that questions about women’s intelligence and risk appetite compared with men’s were “not as settled as one might have initially thought.”

In the process, Mr. Powell, a 41-year-old Bitcoin pioneer, ignited a culture war among his more than 3,000 workers, according to interviews with five Kraken employees, as well as internal documents, videos and chat logs reviewed by The New York Times. Some workers have openly challenged the chief executive for what they see as his “hurtful” comments. Others have accused him of fostering a hateful workplace and damaging their mental health. Dozens are considering quitting, said the employees, who did not want to speak publicly for fear of retaliation.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Crazy stuff about Bored Ape Yacht Club.


YUGA-LABS-BORED-APE-YACHT-CLUB-NAZI-TOTENKOMPF-SKULL.jpg


 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
do you think it's true?
I'm talking about this with some folks in JournoDAO, so I'll just cross-post it here. All of the following posts are mine, from Discord.

  1. Definitely an area that warrants a disciplined investigative eye


  2. [1:53 PM]
    That video is a video essay seems to be taking an investigative approach, but I've only seen the first few minutes so far so I can't attest to the rigor of it


  3. [1:56 PM]
    For all I know it really could just be an esoteric deep-form trolling operation haha, which is what the accusations seem to be pointing that. That, or actual nazism.


  4. [1:58 PM]
    I've thought a lot about the esoteric alt-right troll culture, and how it intersects with accelerationism. I'm pretty familiar with academic far left accelerationist theory, but it seems like the far right has actually been acting on it in ways that the far left hasn't, IE there have been some radical right-wing mass shooters who have been ostensibly influenced by the notion of accelerationism.


  5. [1:59 PM]
    Its really a fascinating area in theory, and a terrifying area in practice.
  6. [2:00 PM]
    And honestly, BAYC as an esoteric far right dog whistle operation is arguably a perfect accelerationist enterprise.
  7. [2:01 PM]
    Assuming that was the motivation, which isn't certain, at least to me
  8. [2:05 PM]
    Accelerationism is essentially a radical form of anti-capitalism, with far left and far right flavors. The notion is that "there is no alternative" (TINA) to capitalism, and the only out is through it, IE the market forces driving capitalism need to be accelerated unto destruction. Its strange because the theory itself seems to have been expounded by relatively harmless upper-middle class left-wing continental philosophers, whereas (probably a handful of) right-wing violent extremists have used the theory as justification and/or inspiration for acts of mass violence.
  9. [2:09 PM]
    The esoterica enters into the picture in really interesting ways. There are certain metaphysical and cosmological Hinduist concepts that factor into this alt-left pseudo-academic online culture that seems to dwell in the annals of 4chan and the like. I say Hinduist, but I'm still not quite certain about the provenance of some of this discourse. So maybe vedic is a better term? Stuff like the Kali Yuga, as cosmological epochs that are defined by mass spiritual trends.
  10. [2:14 PM]
    One of the influential thinkers here is Nick Land, who isn't a Nazi per se, but instead has ostensibly committed to a anti-capitalist line of philosophy that has carried him in interesting directions, to put it mildly. Then again, I haven't checked in on him lately, so maybe it wouldn't be inaccurate to describe him as a Nazi haha. He started out as a far-left, radically feminist Marxian post-structural thinker, at Warwick University. He was part of a would-be department called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which blended a ton of interesting aesthetic and philosophic and cultural discourse, and was ultimately a leftist academic enterprise.
  11. [2:19 PM]
    The CCRU (often referred to in lowercase ccru and maybe even pronounced phonetically haha) is perhaps the most fascinating area of academia in the digital age, in my opinion. One of the other prominent figures was Mark Fisher, who was also adamantly anti-capitalist, and coined the term "capitalist realism" to describe this sense of inescapable market forces that dictate material reality in late-stage capitalist societies. Fisher was critical of the institutional and academic culture of continental philosophy, but he never really made the "horseshoe" transition to being a right-wing thinker. He commit suicide several years ago, and has become a figurehead for a sort of miserabilist strain of anti-capitalist academia.
  12. [2:22 PM]
    Anyway, the ccru blended Deleuzian and Baudrillarian postmodern philosophy with Kabbalah, William Burroughs, Lovecraft, aesthetic theory about jungle music and the club drug scene in London, and ultimately ended up producing some very interesting discourse. Kodwo Eshun was involved in this group, and took this all in an afrofuturist direction. http://www.ccru.net/index.htm (edited)
  13. [2:23 PM]
    This is all to say, that the deep-internet alt-right culture draws some inspiration from this sort of thinking, and I wouldn't put it past such-minded technicians to develop something like BAYC in light of all this.
  14. [2:25 PM]
    The so-called "Intellectual Dark Web" is a sort of watered-down, more modest version of some of this theory, but the actual Nazi stuff and violent extremist stuff is still fringe, even in this context. Most of it was pure academia.
  15. [2:27 PM]
    Also the so-called "Dark Enlightenment" as an intellectual movement is largely attributed to Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, the latter of whom is a source of inspiration for Peter Thiel.
  16. [2:27 PM]
    And allegedly Steve Bannon, although that may have been debunked by now.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
  1. Also, in principle, a great way to get a lot of money in the hands of well-informed affiliates. Unregulated insider trading as a hypothetical (but perhaps actual) means of funding far-right accelerationist agendas. Not trying to be alarmist, nor do I know if there is any sound evidence for this, but in principle it holds up.




  2. [2:32 PM]
    Whereas the left-wing accelerationist school of thought, again being almost purely academic, was perhaps what gave rise to the meme of "fully automated luxury communism"





  3. [2:33 PM]
    It was arguably a non-starter from the offset, and even construable as an exercise in pure philosophy or even conceptual aesthetics.

 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
  1. The critical analysis of it is also esoteric in nature, or at least familiar with esoteric concepts and techniques, IE numerological methods, the western esoteric tradition, etc.




  2. [2:46 PM]
    So its sort of a paradox. Assuming there is an agenda underneath BAYC, which again isn't certain in my mind, anyone who is able to make the case would have to resort to the kind of analysis we'd attribute to conspiracy theorists, IE anyone who sounds the alarm would sound crazy haha.


  3. Nick Land was philosophizing about blockchain as early as a few years ago, when I was neck deep in all this stuff but before I had any interest in blockchain whatsoever. I don't think Curtis Yarvin has given much thought to blockchain, but I'm not certain. Peter Thiel is a major stakeholder in BitDAO, which I learned from Nick (our friend Nick, not Nick Land haha) actually. (edited)




    [2:52 PM]
    But I doubt Land's ability to actually deal with the technical details. He's an extraordinarily gifted philosopher in his own right, an artist even, but I get the impression he's not as concerned with practical details.




    [2:54 PM]
    ccru, only being in existence in the mid 90's, was philosophically championing the internet as something that would disrupt the actors and institutions of societal control, but it was well before distributed ledgers entered the picture, from what I know.




    [2:55 PM]
    Nick Land did a lot of speed and was known to sleep in the ccru's office at the University of Warwick haha




    [2:56 PM]
    ccru was never formally established as an academic department or anything, so the joke was that "Ccru does not, has not and will never exist." haha
    [2:58 PM]
    Here is a taste of Land's writing:
    [2:58 PM]
    Cybernetics folds pragmatism into involutionary technical runaway. Punk arises within the culture of universal prostitution and laughs at the death of the social. ‘No longer resisting the flow of events or pretending to chart a course through them’, 6 cyberpunk soaks up the worst from both. Its compulsive migrations into computer systems register a desperate scrabbling to escape from the clumsily underdesigned, theopolitically mutilated, techno-industrially pressure-cooked and data-baked, retrovirally diseased, tortured, shredded zombie meat.




    [
    2:59 PM]
    You kinda need to be in a psycho-academic trancelike state to even understand a lot of this
    [2:59 PM]
    But believe it or not this writing isn't a pisstake haha
    [3:02 PM]
    This is why I described it as "conceptual aesthetics" rather than anything that is really concerned with teaching the reader in a coherent way.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Its interesting how the society-loathing basement isolation of early internet circles has managed to monetise and commercialise the group alienation in such a dramatic way; arguably one of the greatest tricks of all in modern terms. I suppose it is inevitable given that the digital society increases "our" need to develop these online circles and perpetuate these quasi-affirmation structures to satiate the dopamine needs.

But- as these circles inevitably structure themselves around specific tastes i guess it only serves to lead to the exclusion of other spectrums of culture or taste, hence all those bored ape conventions and the dramatic need for these "owners" to attempt to emblazen their internet (supposed) personality, much akin to the way that lads into crypto seemingly can't talk about anything else etc

These groups are born out of the isolation though, really; i cant see many publicly sociable top shaggers flocking to online NFT marketplace drops or being obsessed with ape jpegs. Not to say that running around with a million women is the be all and end all but i use this as a way to demark the social success. So if you are looking to market your deep-level iceberg theory surreptitious racism then surely creating this niche shite for marginal internet quarters is a perfect route. Plus a lot of these IT lads do make good money now too

As for accelerationism and it's relation towards dark enlightenment, its strange to think that i only really know about this because i read dissensus to see what semi-intelligent (i use this term lightly) lads typed about grime. I guess in a sense the marginal white music internet nerd is just another degree of these insignificant communities that develop outside the mainstream, though at least the music one is born out of enjoying community and getting on it in the clubs.

As opposed to manifesting your own personal failures in life outside of academia into the loathing of the structures that allow for structural freedom. Really it is all born out of failure to fit into conventional societal success, i think; all of these things are an attempt to project your own failings in a way that forces others to confirm to your personal sorrow

Thats enough of that
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I think the creators may even be neo-nazis, underneath all the crypticism and irony.
I have doubts about this, seeing as the team behind the project is very multicultural. Two of the four guys are Jewish, one is Pakistani, and one is Cuban, I believe.

This isn't to say that only certain white people can be nazis, but it does force one to reckon with the chance that the reality is likely more complex.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Its interesting how the society-loathing basement isolation of early internet circles has managed to monetise and commercialise the group alienation in such a dramatic way; arguably one of the greatest tricks of all in modern terms. I suppose it is inevitable given that the digital society increases "our" need to develop these online circles and perpetuate these quasi-affirmation structures to satiate the dopamine needs.

But- as these circles inevitably structure themselves around specific tastes i guess it only serves to lead to the exclusion of other spectrums of culture or taste, hence all those bored ape conventions and the dramatic need for these "owners" to attempt to emblazen their internet (supposed) personality, much akin to the way that lads into crypto seemingly can't talk about anything else etc

These groups are born out of the isolation though, really; i cant see many publicly sociable top shaggers flocking to online NFT marketplace drops or being obsessed with ape jpegs. Not to say that running around with a million women is the be all and end all but i use this as a way to demark the social success. So if you are looking to market your deep-level iceberg theory surreptitious racism then surely creating this niche shite for marginal internet quarters is a perfect route. Plus a lot of these IT lads do make good money now too

As for accelerationism and it's relation towards dark enlightenment, its strange to think that i only really know about this because i read dissensus to see what semi-intelligent (i use this term lightly) lads typed about grime. I guess in a sense the marginal white music internet nerd is just another degree of these insignificant communities that develop outside the mainstream, though at least the music one is born out of enjoying community and getting on it in the clubs.

As opposed to manifesting your own personal failures in life outside of academia into the loathing of the structures that allow for structural freedom. Really it is all born out of failure to fit into conventional societal success, i think; all of these things are an attempt to project your own failings in a way that forces others to confirm to your personal sorrow

Thats enough of that
Yeah I think the experience of sufficient friction, in terms of comfortably assimilating into the culture around you, is causal to a lot of this.
 
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