Crypto is Capitalism's Dumbest Inevitability

Remember, we could have had flying cars instead of this

I still don’t understand an awful lot about crypto. This is starting to become difficult to admit, because I’m beginning to feel like my late grandmother, God rest her soul, who could not figure out how the TV remote control worked and was eventually left completely lost when the move to digital broadcasting made it ever more difficult to tune in every week to watch Heartbeat.

Greengrass is up to no good again

My understanding of economics in general is absolutely abysmal. I don’t engage with the stock market because I don’t understand it. I don’t even have a credit card, I don’t take out loans, and the details of my student debt confuse me. Annuities and gratuities are names of Greek philosophers. I don’t know what “gross” or “net” refer to outside of a fishing context.

Best I can tell you about crypto is I know it when I see it. Since the legitimate advertisers all left Twitter, the vast majority of ads on the platform are either trying to sell me gold bullion like I’m one of the Alex Jones style doomsday bunker preppers who make up half of Twitter’s remaining audience, or else they’re absolute gibberish like I’m one of the crypto enthusiasts who make up the other half.

I know that crypto, tokens, NFTs, and blockchains all fall under the umbrella of what people are calling Web 3.0 or Web3. This makes me wary enough because I do know exactly what Web 2.0 was—it’s all the shit that destroyed the internet the first time. Facebook, influencers, social media, pivot to video, all that terrible garbage. Web 1 is like Predator 1: It’s the only good one.

Crypto’s obnoxiousness comes from the fact that it takes itself incredibly seriously while at the same time just being a hideously ugly cobbled together nonsense montage of stupid meme bullshit.

Crypto guys know what all this means. To you and me it’s all some made up language that only sounds like it means something like when you’re watching Star Trek and they start going on about loading the pulse cannons into reverse polarity with the ion shields. But crypto guys will absolutely stroke their beards and furrow their brows and mutter “indeed” when they read that a whale aped 20e into $BOOP and the mint is live so this might be the last pump before fomo.

Sounds pretty boring

Crypto might well be the future as they say it is. I sure as hell hope not because I don’t really think I want to live in a future that silly. Even though I think they’re a low form of comedy, I will occasionally drop a meme or two. But I just don’t want to buy my groceries with them.

I’m told cryptocurrency is vastly superior to all other currency, which I find to be an extraordinary claim because it doesn’t possess either of the features that come to mind when I think about what makes a currency good, namely:

-          Stability of value, and

-          Ability to be traded for goods and services

But apparently the chief benefit that overshadows these hurdles is that crypto is not controlled by The Fed. I don’t understand The Fed either and any and all attempts to explain it to me just wind up descending into shadowy cabal territory involving the Deep State or George Soros or lizard aliens depending on what kind of crank I’m talking to.

Initially I think cryptocurrency just meant bitcoin? So okay, I can live with that being future currency, it kind of sounds like video game money that Mario spends but whatever. So you buy a bunch of bananas for like, I don’t know, seven bitcoins right?

No! Because one bitcoin is apparently worth like 20 billion fucking dollars. It’s a useless fake meaningless value for a currency to have. If it ever started being accepted at regular shops then you’d trudge your sack of potatoes to the counter and they’d ring you up for zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero twelve bitcoin. You’d miscount the zeroes and accidentally put the decimal in the wrong place and inadvertently sign over an amount equivalent to your mortgage. Which, given my skill with finances, I would absolutely wind up doing.

But bitcoin is just one of an unfathomable number of currencies you can choose from now, because getting The Fed out of money apparently necessitates making every aspect of money, trade, and finance about seven hundred thousand times more complicated. You can now make up a new currency faster than you can make a throwaway email account. And most of these cryptos are just a meme or a picture or a word that someone saw once.

And because most of these crypto bros want desperately to get Elon Musk’s attention, every single word or thought he farts into the world suddenly becomes a cryptocurrency. You’ve got dogecoin, you’ve got teslacoin, you’ve got xcoin, you’ve got grokcoin, you’ve got Grimes alimony coin.

How do you get a crypto… dollar or token or coin or whatever? I know how I get regular money—I do a grinding and largely thankless task for most of every day that I’m alive and in return it lands in my bank account. For cryptocurrency I’m told you have to “mine” it, which sounds like playing that cookie clicker game except on a scale that uses a positively Earth-melting amount of processing power.

What are all these myriad currencies actually worth? Who knows?? Literally nobody. That’s one of the dumbest things about all of this, you see, is that it’s not really currency at all. It’s basically speculation, except instead of speculating on an asset like a house, you’re speculating on a nothing.

You’ve probably heard cynical people say that money is a made-up concept, and well, that’s kind of true in the sense that it stands in for something. All money is actually kind of worthless until it’s traded for something. Crypto just asks the question “What if we just streamline this process by taking away the part where the money stands for something and instead we’re just betting on a currency that dies when we stop believing in it but gets stronger if we clap our hands like it’s a fairy from the Peter Pan universe.”

The thing that really takes this absurdity to its absolute conclusion are the NFTs. When people started talking about NFTs that’s when I decided this entire concept from the ground up is unsalvageable nonsense built on a foundation of the kind of logic that exists only in those dreams you have when you’re not exactly asleep but you’re dog tired and you drift into a half sleep and your brain asks you something like “how would the Pope play a shoe like a guitar?”

An NFT is a non-fungible token, and what that means is that it’s something that only one of it exists. Fungibility, besides being a very silly word like you’d find in a Dr Seuss book, means you can have multiple copies of something and it doesn’t matter which is which. A copy of Catcher in the Rye is fungible. There’s a million of them, they’re all the same book. However, THE copy of Catcher in the Rye that Mark Chapman was carrying when he shot Lennon is non-fungible. That particular specific object cannot be replicated or cloned or traded equally for another copy you picked up at Barnes and Noble.

What’s notable about NFTs is they… they don’t exist. The thing, the object you’re trying to funge, doesn’t exist. You can say “No SPD that’s insane, I’ve seen the NFTs, they are artless pictures of stupid looking apes wearing a variety of hats. They get stolen sometimes and people get really upset about it.”

Well yes, they are ostensibly pictures, or words, or tweets, but that’s not true. The ape picture isn’t the NFT, it’s just a representation of it. You can right click and save the ape, or you can delete it, it’s just data, a thought, an idea, it doesn’t exist like a real object exists. You don’t even retain any rights to the image, the artist does.

So what the hell are people buying with these NFTs? What’s really going to bake your noodle is this: The transaction is the NFT. When you buy an NFT, you hand over some money, the transaction is registered on the blockchain, and what you get in return is that the transaction was registered on the blockchain.

What I just typed was not a late night editing error or a stroke.

Want me to tell you how you know when capitalism has become some kind of religion? When it’s boiled down to an inevitable absurdity so concentrated that it’s difficult to see how it could actually get any sillier. It’s when the abstract idea of property, the fact of ownership, becomes so much more important than what you actually own that what you actually own becomes irrelevant to the point that it can be removed from the equation entirely.

I don’t find many occasions to appropriately use the word “Kafkaesque,” but… yeah.

I think I kind of got off track from my central point, which is that we’re at a technological crossroads right now and we’re making big decisions as a species about what our future is going to look like, and I really hope it’s Star Trek-ish, because if ten years from now I’m paying my medical bills with a picture of Pepe the Frog smoking a giant blunt I think I will just walk into a lake.