Blockchain Radicals
Sometimes we are lucky enough to come across with the kind of material that shifts your perspective on the world, gives your ways to think about something in a different way or allow things to click in place. Last month I read (technically I listened) to Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It by Joshua Dávila and I believe it goes into that bucket:
It was not the first time I came across a material from Joshua, as 1 or 2 years ago I was recommended the series “Blockchain 101 for Socialists” from his blog “The Blockchain Socialist”:
https://theblockchainsocialist.com/category/blockchain_101_socialists/
That series is a nice introduction to topics explored more in-depth in the book, so I recommend everyone that is interested in going ahead and give it a read. Funny enough I had not recognized that Joshua was both the author of the book and the blog until a few chapters in the book :)
Anyhow, back to the book: The first 2 (out of 3) sections of the book introduces and discuss many topics around the concepts of Money and Finance, not only from a cryptocurrency perspective but contrasting with what we have nowadays, which helps to clarify a lot of misconceptions people have about those subjects and set a solid base to discuss cryptocurrencies.
In those same sections I also really liked how grounded (or materialistic) the discussion about cryptocurrency was, for example when talking about “crypto as money” and when discussing the topic of “Code Is Law”, in which the author very well points out it does not work like that since we still live in a society that is governed by its (capitalistic-oriented) laws and we’re not able simple to choose to live outside those laws.
After that, the final section of the book is focused on discussing tentative usages of blockchain/crypto as a technology that can help/support left-wing projects. Those examples are interesting to learn about, even if none of them is clear a fully breakthrough use case of the technology. For example discussions on cooperatives as a form to organise a workplace. I’m not sure that technologies like cryptocurrencies are necessary to organise as such, but it definitely sounds interesting the examples around DAOs.
I would like to highlight a theme/discussion that is more present in the last chapters of the book, although not fully clear from a quick skim of the table of contents, that I really liked which is how lots of people on the left or radical left are very quickly to dismiss or throw aside certain technologies.
Certain technologies by themselves will not be the cause of a breakaway with the current system or the single reason for the success of any revolutionary movement. But totally ignoring certain technologies allow the right-wing/neoliberals to fully dictate the space around them, including where the technology is heading and where/how it should be used.
And in the meanwhile radical revolutionaries should be ready to subvert these technologies, because even if technology is not created in a neutral way, as who has the capital to direct its development chooses how the technology will be shaped, after being created they are not intrinsically good nor bad and its effects or usage depends on who controls it. So the left should be there to fight for these spaces, as the author of the book is doing, since we learned already the disaster that was letting the right take much control of social media and the content in platforms like YouTube and such.
Finally I also need to recommend the audiobook version, narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross, which is the one I listened to.