Are crypto tokens a means to destroy capitalism?

Crypto tokens are not a means to destroy capitalism.

Crypto 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. Crypto tokens are a form of predatory investment that may have wide-reaching consequences in the lives of people it harms.

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

  1. Reijers, Wessel, and Mark Coeckelbergh. 2018. ‘The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies’. Philosophy and Technology 31 (1): 103–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0239-x.
  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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