This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave at the “Commons to
NFTs” conference, organized by Aksioma in Ljubliana, 12.11.2022, for the
a launch for the eponymous book we edited together.
Program: https://aksioma.org/from-commons-to-nfts
Video Streams: https://www.youtube.com/user/aksioma007/streams
The book: https://aksioma.org/from-commons-to-nfts/publication
Alienation and how to (not) overcome it!
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A few days ago, the large crypto-exchange FTX collapsed, after it was
discovered that its investment division had used a self-issued currency
– created out of thin air – as a collateral to borrow real money for
speculation. $ 8 billion, give and take a few hundred millions are
missing [1]. Ups. Sorry. In many ways, this should surprise nobody. As
one scrolls down “web3 is going great” there is the overwhelming
impression that “crypto”, in all its manifestations, is nothing but a
series of frauds with a few basic schemes – theft, Ponzi, rug-pull,
wash-trade – endlessly varied. And on this level of generality, it’s
probably the most accurate thing to say, but this level of generality is
usually not particularly interesting.
I want to go a bit deeper. Because there is a lot more animating the
crypto sphere than simple, rational, if often criminal, calculations.
Rather, running underneath and through these get-rich-quick-schemes are
strong currents of desire of a different future, and these desires are
surprisingly similar – at some level – to those that have been animating
many commons projects over the last 25 years.
The desire I’m talking about is a desire for freedom, or more precisely,
a desire to flee what are seen as fundamentally unfair, oppressive
social institutions. Or, even more precisely, the desire to overcome
alienation and live an authentic life. That we actually don’t really
know, or agree on, what it means to live an authentic life, is precisely
why so many different ideas and practices can be infused with this desire.
This desire to overcome alienation is, perhaps, the most powerful and
long-running desire animating digital culture. And there are two version
of this desire that that found their way into digital culture by way of
the American counter-culture of the 1960s: A a communitarian and a
libertarian one.
But, of course, the prototypical modern desire for authenticity didn’t
originate there. So it’s worth to go back a little bit further, to the
late 18th early 19th century. Then, as s reaction to the enlightenment
and "the cult of reason", romanticism as a counter-movement emerged. It
offered a critique of reason and rationality, focusing on what would
later be called the “instrumentality of reason” which it argued was
draining the world of meaning and turning everything into mere means
(human and natural resources). What was offered instead, was what one
could call the worship of mystery, as something that was precisely
beyond the reach of that kind of instrumentality.
From the beginning, there were two version of mystery. One was, what I
would call, the mystery of transcendental power, and one was the mystery
of deep communion. Now, these mysteries have a lot of things in common,
that’s why it’s easy to flip from one into the others, but it’s worth
keeping them apart for the moment.
The mystery of transcendental power, was, of course, initially religion
and it’s institutions, most importantly, the Roman-Catholic church. The
fought the secularizing tendencies of the enlightenment, as they claimed
to represent a power beyond reason. The mode of accessing this type of
mystery has always been submission. Over time the form of the
transcendental power shape-shifted a few times and there are now
conflicting version of it. Besides religion, there is the charismatic
leader, that transcends the laws of history, and, most importantly for
our purposes, there is also the market.
Emanating from the Austrian School of Economic, particularly Hayek, the
market was seen as a mysterious higher power. The market’s functioning,
they claimed, was beyond comprehension. For mere mortals to intervene
would inevitably lead to disaster, that is, to “the road to serfdom.”
Its main feature -- a hand-- was, to complete the famous cryptic image
of Adam Smith, ‘invisible’, much like the hand of god. At least the one
that doesn’t belong to Diego Maradonna.
The mode of authentic living in this perspective is to accept and submit
to the unquestionable, absolute power (in whatever form one believes in
it) and seek most direct connection to it, either by removing
intermediaries, or accepting only traditional forms of inter-mediation.
Once this submission has taken place, one enters a community of true
believers and within this community, there is equality in submission. At
the end of times, the chosen community will survive, or, if everyone
joins this community here and now and it’s unique form of mystery
worship, paradise on earth will be realized. In market terms, removing
intermediaries is called deregulation: “Let the market work its magic.”
The second mystery was that of communion. Of experiencing direct
relationship with someone or something else that is not mediated through
reason, language and other forms of cultural framing. Initially, the
communion was with nature, as the one force that had been untouched by
the industrial revolution and the instrumental calculation that came
with it.
There was also a strong spiritual dimension of it, but it was
fundamentally a horizontal one, aimed at experiencing the
interconnection with the non-human, as we would say today. The way of
accessing this mystery was to open up, to overcome the crippling of the
senses created by enlightenment and rationality. Like the the mystery of
authority, the mystery of communion also shifted its shape over time and
now exists in multiple forms. It can be nature, it can be the human
community without hierarchy and without rules.
Part of this desire is the belief that if all forms of oppression,
in-authenticity, alienation could be removed, things would naturally
balance themselves into a state of harmony.
You probably have guessed it, these this desire, in its two versions,
animates both the commons and the crypto movement. For the
crypto-movement, code is law and one has to submit to that in order to
become free and enter the community of believers that are all
essentially equal before this higher power. The crypto booster Max
Kaiser put it this way: “We stand naked before Satoshi”, as Inte
Gloerich recalled. Or the frequent claim that the blockchain would store
information “for eternity” (yeah, digital technology doing anything for
even a few decades). This element of submission to power, I think, helps
to explain the affinity of large parts of the crypto-movement to the
far-right.
The belief of returning to or recreating a natural state of harmony is
very strong in the commons movement. Perhaps less in its digital
aspects, but certainly where its ideas of nature overlap with the esoteric.
While I personally tend to sympathize with the desire for communion and
cannot relate to the desire for authority, overall, the desire to
overcome alienation and (re)create authenticity is fundamentally
problematic. I think the alternative is to embrace the fall from grace,
to understand that in order to remake the world, we have to enter into
conflictuous relations, give ourselves rules that enable and constrain
ourselves and embrace the complexities that come with the ambiguity of
existence.
And indeed, the most successful commoning projects have done exactly
that and have been arguing over their rules, how to interpret and adapt
them, ever since. Nobody would describe Wikipedia as an harmonious
community, but, at least so far, it has managed to handle its conflicts
in a self-organized and productive matter. Same could be said about most
of the large software commons. In the same way, the most interesting
crypto project are not those who want abstract away social relations
into some trustless nirvana of pure, unambiguous transactions. But
rather those who use the possibilities of coding rules for their
interaction as a chance to really think about the rules and the kind of
social trust they might create. The challenge, then, is to overcome the
limits of enlightenment, or instrumental, rationality (technocratic
management) without falling into the traps of mysticism.
Thank you very much.
[1]
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/11/12/the-epic-collapse-of-sam-bankman-frieds-ftx-exchange-a-crypto-markets-timeline/
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