M○C△ Confessional: We're Delusional About Crypto's Values

In so many words...

That time of the week again, folks; and so without further ado, in between bouts of feverish emotion concerning your 2024 NBA Champion Boston Celtics, we come together for another:

And I’m going to begin today with a personal anecdote. We’re only going back a few years this time, to late-2019 or early-2020, when, with each passing day, I found myself becoming slightly more a loud and devout supporter of one Mr. Bernie Sanders. Sanders, for those of you who unfamiliar with American politics, is the long-time Democratic United States Senator from Vermont, an incendiary public servant who has proven himself a strikingly popular figure within left-wing American presidential politics for the past two election cycles. Sanders is very old, very impassioned, speaks with a Brooklyn-born Jew’s unique cadence, and effortlessly attracts many young people to his highly-moral and egalitarian brand of Democratic Socialism. Both the left and right mainstream of the country view him as a political extremist, but that only encouraged my further indoctrination into his personage and his policies, to the point that I was prepared to go house-to-house, knocking on doors to preach his gospel and garner support.

And Bernie exulted.

Until one day, I stopped cold and said to myself, “Hey Max, you consider yourself a fairly intelligent and reflective dude, right? Well, you’ve always held a firm and empirical belief that politicians are generally…not awesome people. Even if they were to appear righteous, you know enough about demagogues and dictators to understand how objectively dangerous it is to base one’s politics on a person instead of a belief system. You know that it is far more sensible to support a candidate who reflects your beliefs than support beliefs which reflect a candidate.” Which is exactly what was happening. My politics were no longer my own, they were Bernie’s. I was being tremendously influenced by the Twitter accounts I followed which amplified Sanders’ platform. Once I extricated myself from those, I moved quickly back to myself again.

I’ve always been an anti-authoritarian, distrusting, somewhat cynical kind of dude, especially in political realms. That I would believe even a single candidate to exist somehow outside that paradigm was, for lack of a better word, idiotic of me.

And Bernie furied.

I tell you this not to demonstrate the way social media fundamentally alters our belief systems, but to pose a simple question to all of us in the crypto and crypto art universes.

If crypto really is as advanced as we think it is, and if we’re all such brilliant technocrats, and if we’re also such thoughtful artists, and if we’re so deeply embedded in a culture of anti-authoritarianism and innovation and sovereignty, if crypto art really is an ideological and artistic revolution, if it’s all of them who simply can’t see the paradigm shift happening here, if crypto is all this and all that, and if we too are all this and all that, if this is truly a space populated by misfits and philosophers, the high-minded and the cutting-edge, then why oh why do we so quickly and so easily and so voraciously give in to our dumbest, most childlike instincts when it comes to celebrity and political culture?

Time and time again, be it where political figures, pop-cultural figures, or business figures are concerned, we have this bad habit of dropping our drawers, affixing ourselves with the nearest diaper, sticking our fat thumbs in our mouths, and acting like…babies.

Today’s confession: I don’t believe we deserve any of the value-based accolades we routinely give bestow upon we in crypto culture, because if we did, we wouldn’t be acting the way we do when confronted with celebrity. Crypto may no longer be what it believes itself to be.

Obviously, crypto and crypto art art are not monolithic, and we all are entitled to our own ideas. I’m not saying that crypto artists shouldn’t have their own heroes and their own politics, because of course they will. But we have this nasty and contradictory tendency to, one one hand, consider ourselves value-driven and creative and clear-eyed, while simultaneously betraying these qualities for the most boorish possible reasons.

Okay, so what inspired me to write this newsletter?

Good question. It has a little bit to do with the reappearances of washed-up/controversial musicians (Iggy Azalea), athletes (Ryan Garcia), whatever Caitlin Jenner is now, and shitsuckers (Andrew Tate) into crypto, these ghouls leveraging their celebrity for transparent and extractive pump-and-dump schemes. It’s less about these celebrities themselves, however, and more about the fact, well, one would think that even the degenerate, influencer-sycophantic dipshit contingent of crypto would have wised up by now to what’s really going on here

The arguments I routinely see supporting these “celebrity”-backed incursions into crypto (by influencer figures like Ansem) generally position them as overall positive trends. This signals mainstream adoption! It brings crypto exposure to large audiences! We should welcome all financial pumps, no matter how opportunistic or brief they may be! Things like that.

But every one of these arguments is clearly and obviously and historically bullshit.

When Lil Pump tattoos Solana on his forehead and blasts that picture out to millions of followers, it doesn’t take a ton of brainpower to conclude that only a fraction of his followers will even see his post, that the overwhelming majority of these followers are not looking for crypto content from Lil Pump, that even fewer would actually make financial decisions based on a rapper’s Instagram post, and that, for most people, it just reinforces their belief in crypto being a scam. When Floyd Mayweather or Antonio Brown launched shitcoins/NFTs during the 2021 cycle, it signaled nothing positive to the wider world; the public did not pay any more attention, and if they did, they were influenced negatively. When Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon talked about their Bored Apes on the Tonight Show, it only moved public opinion further towards horror and outrage. Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Justin Bieber; what many in crypto saw as signs of coming mainstream appeal was proven as nothing more than cheap opportunism.

When celebrities come to crypto, it’s to make fun of us, take advantage of us, and snatch away our capital. This is apparent in their actions, their communications, and the sum total of their past performance.

But enough about degenerates and influencers because that’s not who I really want to take aim at today. I only use these people to demonstrate a point:

We deny what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears, we deny our very logic systems so as to affix misplaced optimism to these extractive and cynical individuals. We do this even when it betrays our most cherished values. From where I sit, it seems like we are desperate to do so.

You can certainly point to the above contingent of degenerate crypto fiends and say “Well, these people have no values, they are only here to make a buck.” If that were true, however, they might remember how much money they’d collectively lost on the scams of the past. They might perceive more clearly that such celebrity tactics actually have a chilling effect on public opinion. There is a value-set hidden deep in there, even if it is financially motivated. But the point is that those values aren’t considered sacred. They’re forsaken as soon as a shiny new thing appears before them.

This is not at all a trend reserved for the degenerate sect of cryptocurrency; it is alive and well in crypto art as well. It is a version of the same instinct which has drien so many artists to align themselves with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, institutions which are avowedly extractive. An auction house’s entire business model is value extraction from creatives. Yes, I know, this alignment does often have short-term positive effects on an artist’s career. I get why people do choose such an alignment.

But you have to be delusional if you think you can partner with an auction house and still genuinely hold crypto art’s values dear.

Because if you really were a crypto artist, that would mean you believed in decentralization and self-sovereignty. You would not pander to the mainstream. You would be instinctively positioned against middlemen, gatekeeping, and market manipulation. Feel free to disagree, but it is my assertion that if you align yourself with an auction house, you are no longer a crypto artist. The two things are mutually exclusive.

When one’s preached principles no longer jive with their actions, those principles become hollow and worthless. In order to hold a set of values as one’s own while consistently acting in opposition to those values requires a certain kind of delusion.

And the crux of this entire essay is that I think crypto art is far more delusional than we believe it to be.

Let’s take this same delusional paradigm and apply it back to celebrity relationships. Crypto art is definitely a bit more high-brow than crypto culture at-large. Here we throw our support behind tech titans, say, instead of washed-up athletes. We exalt political leaders instead of Soundcloud rappers. Not always, I suppose. We still have Beeple engaging with Andrew Tate for some unknowable reason, but for the most part, when we in crypto art deny our rationality, ignore our observations, and abandon our value systems for the sake of lapdogging some public figure, it’s generally someone in the tech or political or financial arenas.

But we’re so high on our own supply that we can’t see how, in reality, we’re no different than the degenerates upon whom we spit. We act illogically and in opposition to our communicated values; we are delusional.

A few examples:

Recently, Donald Trump has begun to campaign on cryptocurrency protection and expansion. But if you look at his past actions within crypto, it’s all vague sentiments and terrible NFT projects designed to extract value. He kept few of his campaign promises when he won the presidential election in 2016, that it’s absurd to think he’ll automatically make good on his pro-cypto claims. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because this isn’t really even about Trump as an individual or a candidate. I mean, just consider the notion of supporting any presidential candidate as a crypto believer. Do you think the Cypherpunks or Satoshi Nakamoto, for instance, would agree that the party of Ronald Reagan, corporate tax cuts, and war-hawking fits with crypto’s values? The answer is obviously, no. And yet a staggering number of individuals on my timeline talk about Donald Trump as if he’s some messianic crypto savior. He and his competition are both enemies of crypto. When Trump says he’ll “ensure that the future of crypto and Bitcoin will be made in America” it’s important to understand that THIS IS NOT IN LINE WITH CRYPTO’S VALUES. To throw weight into one political side-of-the-aisle is the miss the point entirely.

Folks do the same with Elon Musk. You know, Elon Musk, the shadowy super-billionaire whose “support of crypto” has taken the form of Dogecoin scam pumps, using Bitcoin payments as a marketing gimmick, and the complete destruction of crypto Twitter through algorithmic manipulation, shadow-banning of legitimate crypto figures, and amplification of influencer activity. But plenty of people are willing to set the man’s actions aside entirely because of some presupposed idea about his values. When did we start making excuses for the richest men in the world? When did we start to view them as allies?

For the purpose of our exercise, we can think of Blackrock and Fidelity and Franklin —the giant hedge funds, all of whom rolled out Bitcoin ETFs in the last few months— as celebrities too. I’ll say it again:

You cannot truly hold crypto values while supporting any of these mammoth, monolithic financial institutions, no matter how much money they made have made you in the short-term.

These people are the enemy. How is that not clear? Get in bed with the enemy if you like, but understand that by fucking them, you are fucking all of crypto in return.

Support for these figures/institutions —our hifalutin celebrities— is incompatible with the foundations of this culture. This isn’t about right-wing or left-wing, it’s about centralization vs. decentralization. It’s about who controls the levers of power and why we would ever support them in their consolidation. It’s about why these individuals approach crypto culture and what they hope to gain from us.

I was under the impression that crypto was a threat to existing power structures, but I guess that’s bullshit. I was led to believe that centralization was the enemy, but I guess none of us ever considered how sexy centralization would look in that dress. I found myself attracted to crypto art because it clung tightly to a niche and unifying set of beliefs, but with each new promotion of Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Blackrock, I more clearly realize that I was mistaken.

We’re supposed to sit voluntarily outside the mainstream. We’re supposed be incisive. We’re supposed to see singularly through the bullshit and lies and propaganda. We’re supposed to be rebels! We’re supposed be dangerous, god damn it! But we aren’t anymore. And we’d have to be delusional to think that we are. We’d have to deny the reality before us.

Crypto culture will survive, as will crypto art, regardless of its value set. Value sets are constantly changing. Early Marxism and Russian Communism did not hold complimentary values. I just don’t think we can willfully deceive ourselves any longer. If crypto really firmly believed in what it claims over and over and again and again to believe, it wouldn’t be acting like it over and over and again and again does.

And I don’t think it does us any good to remain delusional about that fact.

-Your friendly (and delusional) neighborhood Art Writer,

Max

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