Holy shit, I loved this article. This writer is so perceptive and honest, I could feel the emotion of every moment she describes on the ship. Thanks for sharing.
I've been living with this: For a couple days now. I ricochet between "that's really insightful" to "if men made that stereotype about women we'd be roasted alive" to "but it's accurate" to "but it's not accurate of all men" to "but it's accurate of enough men that you agree with it with no substantial reservations" and, like most good writing, you can't buttonhole it and move on. On the one hand, the people I know who delve in cryptocurrency aren't like this. On the other hand, every public forum I've ever visited about cryptocurrency is drearily like this. You can not be the stereotype and still acknowledge the grinding prevalence of the stereotype. Which makes the heinous schadenfreude of the Brooks Brothers set all the worse - it's one thing to be hated on by those fuckin' Goldman Sachs-worshipping BankerBros. It's another when they have a point.One of the ways men bond is by demonstrating collective power over women. This is why business deals are still done in strip clubs, even in Silicon Valley, and why tech conferences are famous for their “booth babes.” It creates an atmosphere of complicity and privilege. It makes rich men partners in crime.
Yea. BankerBros having a point definitely smarts. The crypto movement is as wide open to criticism as any movement that promises the world with not much to show for it. The spirited defense from McAfee et al notwithstanding, the crypto-futurist movement has had virtually zero impact on 99% of the population. Yet several people have made a lot of money, often on the backs of those more ethical exponents of crypto's potential. The movement has the trappings of the dot-com bubble, but with the added seediness of crypto's sheer criminality. You and I both know some ethical, visionary people moving the needle in this space. What's the movement lacking?
Time. They need time. I read Galbraith's The Great Crash of 1929 (written in '55 and considered the gold standard) and it was all about speculation so feverish that little old ladies and shoe shine boys were interested in the stock market. But fuck you, Galbraith, watch an eTrade commercial some time. Now that the lucky have a 401k or a Roth, we're all fuckin' shoe shine boys now. I read Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World (Pulitzer winner, 2010) and it's got more than its fare share of little old ladies and shoe shine boys in the stock market. But it also focuses on the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic and how it was an active choice by a central banker who pursued it relentlessly in an attempt to inflate away Germany's war debt. More than that, it lists a few historical prices: GM peaked at $103 and went down to $7. RCA went from the 90s to like $3. That's two orders of magnitude in the space of a year or two for a pair of blue chips that pretty fuckin' much defined stability for the broader stock market for decades. Even now fuckin' Ford is at like $8.43. Here's the problem: when you look up "historical" data you get shit back to like 2011. Nobody even fuckin' remembers the Great Recession. They sure as shit don't remember the Nifty Fifty or The End of Equities or the march of fucking despair that was The Great Depression or why so to these bullshit business majors, "bubble" is this abstract miasma of tulips and sock puppets with microphones but fuck you, mutherfuckers, buy low sell high is a 400-year-old scam played by confidence men who, if they hold onto their money long enough, will convince their friends and neighbors that they've always been destined to be rich. You know what's wrong with the crypto movement right now? It's full of skeezy pioneers like the '49ers who rushed out to San Francisco. it's full of the basement dwelling scumbags whose primary skillset started with the ability to make free phone calls. It's full of the ne'er-do-wells with nothing to lose and everything to gain that aren't interested in socially-acceptable grift. That means people who worship scumbags like John McAfee until they get blown out of the water by people who worship scumbags like the Winkelvoss Twins until they get blown out of the water by people who worship scumbags like Alan Greenspan. If you look up GM's IPO, you'll see the whole of the Intarwebs declaring it was fuckin' Nov 17, 2010. If you say "no really, internet, when did they first go public" they'll say "no ferreal Nov 17 2010." Which is true - that's the point where GM clawed its way out of delisting thanks to thirteen point four fucking billion dollars from Ma and Pa Taxpayer. GM went from $93 in 2000 to $1 in 2009 but you won't find a single person on the planet scolding you for investing in GM stock. They may question your judgment but they won't cast aspersions for your immorality. Which means people who are playing in crypto are the ones that are immune from the shaming of the broader finance industry. There's a bunch of kids in my machining program. Talkin' 16 year olds, 17 year olds. I overheard one of them tell another that he was taking his graduation money and putting it in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero because he figures there's more growth potential. The "movement" is lacking time. That's it. When George Gilder answers "what's after Google" with "ethereum" the writing is on the fucking wall.
Is your point that the objects of speculation will only get more sophisticated but we'll always be fuckin' shoe shine boys? Or that blockchain is some new political economy?
I'm a Laurie Penny fanboy, and give her money every month via Patreon specifically so she can do this type of writing. She single-handedly popped the Milo Yiannalopopoloppoulus bubble that led directly to his current state of destitution. That article was brilliant. Just like this one...