Tech Won't Save Us - Bitcoin is a Right-Wing Technology w/ David Golumbia

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by David Golumbia to discuss the ideology of cyberlibertarianism, the right-wing politics of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, and why the left shouldn’t embrace them.David Golumbia is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of “The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.” He’s also writing a new book called “Cyberlibertarianism” from Minnesota University Press. Follow David on Twitter as @dgolumbia.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:David wrote about cyberlibertarianism for Jacobin Magazine.Keith Spencer interviewed David about his book for Salon in 2018.Elon Musk’s tweets affect cryptocurrency prices, while China is cracking down on crypto mining.Marc Andreessen says “crypto is a right wing idea” in an interview with Noah Smith.El Salvador’s right-wing authoritarian president made Bitcoin a form of legal tender.Tether misled people about how much USD was backing its stablecoin.About 20% of Bitcoin — worth billions of dollars — is lost and recoverable.Other resources: Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” and “Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects for Community”; Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s “The Californian Ideology”; Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”; Paulina Borsook’s “Cyberselfish” (article); and John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”Support the show

You kind of put computer in the sentence and people who would know like, whoa, I should really be concerned about that can just turn around and, you know, all of a sudden be like, well, of course we don't want government interfering. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get to this week's guest, a special announcement. I've had people asking me for quite a while now when we were going to get Tech Won't Save Us t-shirts. So if that is something you're interested in, if you want to sport the podcast logo on your chest, that is now an option you can avail of. I'm using a company called

Bonfire for a few reasons. Firstly, I know people who've used them before and they tell me that it's a good quality t-shirt. Second, it was an easy way to offer a lot of different sizes for people because I looked at a few different options and some of them made that kind of difficult. And third, it's kind of difficult for me to manage fulfillment of t-shirts right now if I were to get them made myself. So this is an easy way, at least for now, to use this company that will, you know, make the t-shirts, manage the fulfillment. So how this works is when you buy a t-shirt from Bonfire, they kind of do them in batches. So, you know, if you buy one today, it's not going to ship tomorrow. It'll take a couple weeks until this batch is complete. So if you buy one in this kind of first wave, they'll start to ship around mid-July, I believe. And so then hopefully by around the end of the month or early August at the latest, you'll get your T-shirt. There are a couple options.

There is a black T-shirt with a red logo. That's the one I'll be getting. But then for people who do prefer to wear colorful clothes, which is not me, there's also a T-shirt with a black logo and a number of different colored shirts that you can choose from for that as well. So you can obviously find the links for those in the show notes. So if you want a t-shirt, feel free to take advantage of that option. Now on this week's episode, I'm speaking to David Columbia. David is an associate professor in the

English department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of The Politics of Bitcoin, Software as Right-Wing Extremism. He's also writing a book on cyber libertarianism for Minnesota University Press, which will come out next year. Now, obviously, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, all these things have been in the media a lot lately, especially in the past year, as a lot of the prices of these cryptocurrencies have soared yet again. And then more recently, you know, they've been on a bit of a roller coaster, depending on what Elon Musk decides to tweet one day or the next, or the actions that are being taken against cryptocurrency mining in China. Now, personally, and this will be very clear in the interview, I'm not a supporter of cryptocurrencies or blockchains or anything

like that. I know that some listeners might disagree with me. You know, that's completely okay. You have your right to do that. But this is kind of how I see it. I recently reread Langdon Winner's Do Artifacts Have Politics? And in that article, he discusses two different ways that technologies can have politics embedded within them or be associated with certain politics. And essentially, the first one is when a technology is kind of highly associated with certain politics. And essentially, the first one is when a technology is kind of highly associated with a certain type of politics, but it's not necessarily inherent to it. It can be utilized in a different way in certain circumstances. And then the second is when a technology is created and it kind of requires a particular politics to work properly. And for me, when I look at blockchains, when I look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, when

I look at the politics that seem built into these technologies that they seem reliant on, I feel that they are in that second category, that this kind of anti-government politics that is associated with the libertarian right is kind of inherent to these technologies. I'm not of the view that they can be repurposed for left-wing ideals. And again, I know that some people disagree with me. That's completely okay. But that's my view. And I figured I would lay it out at the beginning of this episode. So you're well aware of what you're getting into as you listen. In the interview, David describes how there are kind of foundational ideas to Bitcoin that come from these conspiracy theories that are associated with right-wing politics. But then as they kind of come into

the mainstream, these technologies and these ideas associated with them, they get divorced from that history. And we forget where these narratives that are really inherent to these technologies, to the narratives around them really come from. And I think that's so important to remember. If you think back to the episode that we did with Margaret O'Mara, and near the end of that interview, how we were talking about the ideas that started to be embedded in Silicon Valley and computing technologies, personal computers in particular, through the 70s and the 80s, and how that was not reflective of the actual past, and how the kind of right-wing politics of that era, the neoliberal politics, and how that mixed with the counterculture ideals, you know, obviously that comes through in Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's The Californian

Ideology, which I spoke about recently with Richard Barbrook. And then that really bleeds into what comes through in the internet later. These narratives that David talks a little bit about in this interview, you know that cyberspace should be a place where there is no government, where the government has no authority, no sovereignty. And this is positioned as freedom, as a way of promoting freedom, when really it's about excluding the government and the market then, the private companies then get free reign. And so naturally, you know, I think it's important that we pay attention to the politics that are in these technologies, and that we not get distracted by narratives that sound positive without really

digging into where those narratives come from and properly understanding, you know, what the real impacts of the technologies are, instead of getting distracted by, you know, how people talk about them. So I know that's a long introduction. I'm sorry. Just briefly, Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you liked this episode, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would find it interesting. And if you appreciate the work that I put into making this podcast every week, you can join supporters like Sarah Elkins and Seth from the UK by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming

a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. David, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm so happy to be here. I like your show a lot. Thanks for having me. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. You know, I've been looking forward to it for a while. You know, I feel like you are probably kind of ahead of the game on identifying some of these right-wing political tendencies in technologies like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that I want to talk to you about today. But obviously to, you know, set the foundation for the discussion that we're going to have. Based on reading your work, there's a concept of cyber libertarianism that stands out as being really important to kind of illustrate kind of what is going on here and what the politics of these technologies are. So to start, I was hoping that you could kind of outline what you see cyber libertarianism as being and why it's important to understand that when we talk about the politics of technology

today. Sure, I'm happy to talk about it. So let me say cyber libertarianism is a term that was come up with by the philosopher of technology Langdon Winner in the late 1990s. The way I use it, it is pretty much synonymous with another phrase we hear a lot, the Californian ideology, which was written about in an essay about the same time by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron. And what they were trying to get at when they came up with these terms, especially cyber libertarianism, is often misunderstood. It is not meaning to say that

technology promotion is exclusively carried out by people who identify themselves as part of the political right. That would be something that is actually true, right, that a lot of technology promoters are part of the right wing or at least part of the political right. But it's trying to capture something broader, which is that a lot of technology promotion, and I'm going to put it in my own words here, doesn't understand the foundations of the politics that it advocates. And there's a great example of this right now because of the economist Noah Smith just published an interview with Mark Andreessen, who is generally not understood as a far-right figure. But Andreessen gives this account of Silicon Valley politics, where he says that,

you know, everyone in Silicon Valley is left wing, except for him and a few of his friends. And by left wing, he means, and he says, the default politics of Silicon Valley is left wing, meaning that most people in Silicon Valley vote for the Democratic Party. And, you know, I think there is a little grain of truth in that. I think that if we looked at voting patterns, we would see that there was many more people voting for the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. But if we dig a little deeper and we look at the kind of hot button issues that people in technology care about, and these are slogan issues that we all know so well from things like open source to open access that we hear about in academia, to net neutrality, to some quasi-political causes like SOPA and PIPA that we used to hear about about five or six or seven years ago,

Stop Online Privacy Act. These are causes that people in Silicon Valley really care about, as a rule, a lot more than they care about non-technological political issues. What they don't seem to see is that the positions they are advocating on those issues actually have much more legibly right-wing foundations than they do left-wing foundations. By which I mean that if we look at them just in the abstract from a sort of political science perspective, they fit into right-wing accounts of politics and of the world much more neatly than they do into left-wing accounts. And also, if we look at them in a more genealogical or historical sense, they were developed by people on the right for very specific reasons.

As an example, one of the obvious outlets for digital utopianism in the early days was Wired Magazine. People still read Wired Magazine, but back in the day when it was published mostly on paper, it had these glitzy graphic design, very, very positive about the development of technology. And, you know, the people who ran Wired Magazine were far-right conservatives. The people we associate with it, people like George Gilder, who was on the cover several times and talked about a lot on it. Newt Gingrich was one of the heaviest promoters of the ideology there, and was featured on the cover several times. Kevin Kelly, who is still a leading voice in technology promotion,

is an evangelical Christian with pretty typically far-right evangelical beliefs. You know, at the time, it was clear that this kind of understanding of the world was coming out of the political right. And some of the ways in which it did that should be pretty transparent in the sense that I mentioned some kind of specific issues that we could go into if we felt like it. And I should mention that my follow-up book to the Bitcoin book is a kind of historical and philosophical discussion of cyber libertarianism, which is probably why I'm going on a little bit about it here. But at the core of the cyber libertarian belief system, which is maybe best articulated in John Perry Barlow's famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,

which happens right around the same time, is the idea that governments have no business intervening in the life of people. Barlow makes this distinction between the online world and the offline world. You know, he has this incredible rhetoric about you fleshy giants of iron and steel or whatever that have no business here in cyberspace. Cyberspace is a part of the world free from what he would call law or government, but which somebody like me would call democracy. And the rhetorical games that are played with this are so interesting because they are all kind of couched in the rhetoric of democracy that, you know, can be used in a poetic sense very easily. But what it's being used for in a more

logical sense is to say, you know, the thing that we understand as the core structure of democracy in our world, which is namely representative governments formed by democratic elections, should be unable to touch digital technology. And, you know, that is a crazy view. It's not only a crazy view, but it's a view that only somebody who really, really did not believe, you know, in some of the, I don't even want to call them right wing, right? These are to some extent centrist, to some extent, moderate conservative. And then, in my view, pretty much everyone on the left, excluding maybe some anarchists, are going to say, well,ators. This kind of anti-government hostility is everywhere in cyber libertarian and digital technology promotion. And it's certainly the thing that Winner and Barbrook and Cameron were pointing at and some other writers at the time,

this kind of visceral hostility toward government that, at least in the US, has a really clear political lineage going back to the Austrian economists, Mises and Hayek and their political offspring, and James Buchanan and the public choice theory of economics that became associated with the Koch brothers and the kind of agenda they promote. These are not innocent propositions, and they are not confined solely in any way to digital technology. It's just that for some reason, when they show up in digital technology, a lot of people who would recognize them as right-wing propositions in the wild, but when you apply them to digital technology, suddenly people who should know better hop on board. And that's part of why the cyber libertarianism framework is so important

to me, because it's drawing attention to the fact that you kind of put computer in the sentence, and people who would know like, whoa, I should really be concerned about that can just turn around and, you know, all of a sudden be like, well, of course, this is what we want, right? Of course, we don't want government interfering with how we get information on the computer. I mean, I could give lots of examples, right? But that is the general background of cyber libertarianism. It is this concern that for whatever reason, when we start talking about digital, our ordinary understanding of politics kind of drops away. And what rushes in to fill that vacuum is a disturbingly well articulated and well understood foundation of right wing politics. I think that's a really good introduction

to the concept. And you know, Richard Barbrook was on the show recently. And I think Fred Turner's book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, also kind of outlines this history in a really effective way. And I want to return to your point about the opposition to government that is found in a lot of this kind of cyber libertarian thinking that then kind of influences the broader discussion when the history is kind of forgotten, and it's just kind of accepted as this general narrative. But before we get into that, I also wanted to ask you, like, you know, you wrote The Politics of Bitcoin back in 2016. You've obviously been paying attention to this for a while. So how did you come to start looking into Bitcoin and blockchain? And what were the narratives around them when they were first taking off and gaining attention that you noticed and that worried you at the time. Sure. And to back up for a second, Fred Turner's book is amazing. And he doesn't use the word cyber libertarianism all that often in his book. And it's more recent than Barbrook and Cameron and Winner, but it is absolutely vital to any understanding of the whole phenomenon. I should also add the journalist Paulina Borsuk, who wrote a book, I believe in

1999, called Cyber Selfish, which is kind of an insider account of the development of Wired magazine and focuses a lot on the gender politics of Silicon Valley and San Francisco at the time. And if people want to read up on these topics, those things are they're all different, but they all are complementary and they tell a very troubling story. Anyway, to answer the question you asked, I am trained as a literary critic. And the way that that has emerged in recent years is that a lot of us who are trained that way don't necessarily spend a lot of time reading novels or films or other sort of proper works of literature, but often kind of read parts of culture as if they were texts. So I actually was not originally somebody who worked on computers. I worked on contemporary literature. And then I worked in computers in New York City on Wall Street in the 1990s during the first dot-com boom. And in fact, in financial technology, which was a pretty interesting thing to be part of and very challenging and very fast-paced.

And it became sort of second nature to look at new developments in technology and to try to read them in that literary or political sense to try to figure out what were some of the underlying politics that might be revealed in figures of speech or in stories that people would tell, the way people would talk. So in general, I look for that stuff. And that's what a lot of my other work is about. But when Bitcoin started to experience some price rises, especially in the early 2010s, I was paying a little bit of attention to the rhetoric around it. And one of the things that I noticed that was apparent to me from my time on Wall Street was that there was this really remarkable resurgence of this talk about economics that on Wall Street is widely considered to be conspiracy theory.

If you were on Wall Street as I was, you know, the very back pages of some of the second rate newspapers that are probably no longer even being published and the newsletters that people publish for insane amounts of money, $1,000, $2,000 a month, and you can subscribe to their special insights that these people claim to have. The mainstream people on Wall Street just consider this stuff to be beyond the pale. You kind of can't get rid of it. And one of the big areas for this kind of conspiracy theory on Wall Street is gold. And there is just this amazing and persistent but low-level advocacy for gold that lurks around Wall Street

that is almost exclusively engaged in by people with a vested interest in gold, people who themselves are gold investors, but then tell you that gold has qualities that other investments do not have, which there is a tiny grain of truth to that, right? But it is way exaggerated by these people. And if you go to ordinary Wall Street professionals and say, should I invest in gold? They might say something like, well, if you have a lot of money and you really are committed to it, maybe you could put 1% or 2% of your assets in gold. But in general, it's not a really important asset class. It's not a good thing to be in.

It's very unpredictable. But in general, ordinary people should stay away from it. And in order to promote gold, especially, but some of these other wonky investments, you know, they have this whole conspiratorial view of the world in which the Federal Reserve is really run by these insidiously selfish people who are surreptitiously stealing money from the people that they work for, which is, you know, part of what is so odd about it is that these conspiracy theories were developed in the late 19th and early 20th century when central banking had a notably different form than it has today. So that at least in the US and most of other developed

democracies, like central bankers are literally not allowed to have personal stakes in the investments that they in some sense have some management power over. So the regulatory systems exist to prevent them from kind of bilking the public in the way that the conspiracy theorists say, but they're not interested in the facts, right? They have this whole architecture built in which the point of the Federal Reserve is to steal your money by raising interest rates so that your money becomes worthless. And there is a pretty significant hangover of anti-Semitism to it based on the sort of old stories about Rothschild bankers and Jewish people illicitly stealing money from you for their own purposes. And virtually nobody takes

it seriously. And to see it have this resurgence under the name of what was supposedly the newest, greatest technology, it really did surprise me. At first, I would see little bits of it and I would think like, no, I can't really be seeing this, right? They can't really be doing this stuff. Not least because as I write about in the book, and we can talk about some more probably, the analogy between Bitcoin and gold, it's not only tenuous, but you have to do some pretty serious reality denial to even claim that there is something gold-like about Bitcoin, which won't stop them, right? One of the major books promoting Bitcoin in recent years, Safedine Amos's The Bitcoin Standard, is all about how you could peg an economy to Bitcoin in the way that economies

were at some point pegged to gold. It's just an absurd, counterfactual idea that you can't even make it work logically, but that doesn't stop these people. So that was really what got me interested in it, that instead of developing a kind of new way of talking about the economy, what seemed to be happening was this resuscitation of old tropes that most of us had thought were just so marginal and so obviously false that very few people would ever take them up. And the more I started to focus on it, they were starting to not just, you know, float to the surface, but be defended real force by people. That is the thing that really drove my interest in it. That is certainly still there. But a lot of other things interest me, too, including, you know, I tried to have an open

mind about what is what does blockchain actually do? Does it actually work? And this, I think, is a very interesting question in the sense that blockchains clearly are running. They are running all over the place, consuming huge amounts of energy. They are algorithms that perform something. Nobody could deny that, and one would be foolish to try to deny it. But do they do what the proponents say they do? Do they produce the stuff that proponents say they produce? And there I think you are in a really different territory, because I think that in general, the claims made for blockchains are just fraudulent. They don't do the stuff that people claim at all. I've sometimes called blockchain a kind of

QAnon for technology, in that it is a technology that runs, and yet what it produces is a distortion of reality that includes the fact that you can't even ask in a rational and sort of objective way, well, does this stuff actually do what it says it does? It doesn't. It is really fascinating in that sense of the sort of combination of a real thing plus a fictional thing that are sutured together in such a powerful way. And the way that I also associate with far-right thinking, in which this sort of desire to run away from reality while claiming you are actually the ones who are paying the closest attention to it is something that we see break out all over the place. When I have been reading about these histories, like as you're talking about with cyber libertarianism earlier, and it seems like there's this notion that there are politics like inherently built into these technologies. bringing freedom, offering a means of kind of distributed governance or, you know, something

like that, like they seem like they are really positive in this way. But then when you actually dig into how power is exerted through them, the actual impact that they're having on the world, we see that, you know, actually those narratives about kind of the positive politics that can be implemented through them or that they can bring to the world are not reflective of the positive politics that can be implemented through them or that they can bring to the world are not reflective of the real impact and also have the effect of making people feel that just deploying these technologies, just developing these technologies is enough to kind of improve the world. You know, you don't need political struggle. You don't need to engage with the political system or organize or anything

like this. Absolutely. You don't need to. And in fact, maybe you shouldn't. As an example, in the Bitcoin discourse, you know, one of the big words is decentralized or decentralization, right? And in fact, in that interview, I was just talking about with Mark Andreessen, he talks about how Bitcoin realizes a right-wing politics because of its emphasis on decentralization. And decentralization is a word with a fascinating history, which you won't be surprised to hear. There's Hayek and people like that have talked about it for a long time. And it typically just means anti-government in the way that they use it, right? But to go to your specific question, how does that word show up in Bitcoin?

Well, blockchain is a protocol, right? It's a way of describing how computer systems can function the same way that HTML is a protocol that describes how you can write webpages and so on. And blockchain says, well, there's not going to be a central authority that is running all the transactions, right? The way a bank or an investment bank or something keeps track of its transactions. Everybody who wants to can chip in and run this software on their computers. Then the power of the network will be combined together and we'll use that power to verify the transactions and run them through the system. And nobody will be able to spoof the system because all the other nodes that are running the software can check it. You hear that and you think, well, philosophically, that sounds like it is something that prevents the concentration of power. Like rhetorically, that's how it's

presented. Like, okay, it's decentralized and that's good because we should not want centralization of power because that is authoritarianism, that is dictatorial politics, that is bad. So decentralization in that respect is good. Power is spread out, it's shared by people, and there's a kind of implicit corollary that it's egalitarian, right? If it's decentralized, then all these different people are participating, and they must all be participating in some relatively equal way. And that is a wonderful thing compared to, you know, whatever one thinks of the way democracies are currently run. But the problem with that thinking is that the decentralization in blockchain is kind of built into the protocol as a way of describing how the protocol can be run. But there aren't any governing principles in the technology, at least as it's currently

being used, or as it's currently described, that enforce the kinds of rules that would create egalitarianism. So yes, it's true that in theory, anyone can run a Bitcoin blockchain node. But in practice, as the network demands more and more power to verify transactions, what happens is that people with the resources to invest in more and more equipment and more and more power end up dominating the network to an enormous extent. So that, you know, in a kind of politically hilarious convergence of events, people can describe the Bitcoin blockchain as the most decentralized mode of, you mode of economic transfer ever developed. And yet, in reality, it is one of the most centralized modes of economic transfer ever

developed because the number of people who actually can run these nodes is very, very small. Now, you could run one of these nodes on your own home computer if you felt like it, and so could I. But in practice, we probably have ordinary machines that at this point, if they ever verified a single transaction, it would be a miracle. They could just run forever and they would contribute some tiny little percentage to the system, whereas the people who are really running it are running enormous server banks that are cooled by all kinds of, I mean, the amount of energy you need just to cool the servers, let alone to run the servers, is beyond belief. So that you have this weird bifurcation where you can say, oh, this is this decentralized system. It realizes this terrific political

goal of spreading out power among people. But in practice, it does the exact opposite. Did Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that actually is, did he understand that when he wrote the blockchain protocol? I tend to think not. I tend to think that this was rather kind of investment in a political worldview that is poorly thought out. A lot of libertarian-influenced philosophies are kind of directed at a thing that they decide that they dislike very much that is bad, and therefore they're going to produce an alternative that is wonderful, but it's really up at this abstract level. And when you look at what happens in practice, it's something else entirely. It often is very unpleasantly, very far-right forces that come in and take over. I think that's a big part of what's happened in the Bitcoin and

blockchain world in that because so much of the pressure was against regulation and against centralization as if these things were terrible in and of themselves, what you did was incent people for whom regulation is a problem to put all of the resources they can into the system. And of course, those tend to not be the most honest actors in the world. You know, and by the way, I want to be clear, I am not saying that finance is some terrific system that works for everybody and is incredibly beneficial. It has huge problems in it, right? But at the same time, it is, especially in the developed democracies, it is an incredibly highly regulated system. And those regulations, in many ways, serve people maybe better than they understand that they serve us. But just tilting against them,

it's dangling a carrot out in front of people who are seeing those regulations as a problem. And the rest of us who don't see them as a problem are not likely to want to dip our hands into them very, very much. And just to give an example, one of the features of the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency system is that it is, quote unquote, immutable or permanent in the sense that once you put a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, it cannot be erased or changed. You know, we could talk a lot about whether that's a similar feature to what exists in other systems, but this is offered, you know, the word trust is thrown around a lot with regard to this feature, like, oh, you can't erase something. So we can always trust that it's going to be there.

And that means you have some kind of really powerful property interest in the transactions or the resources that you share over the network. And that all sounds really good, right? But what that means in reality is that if I accidentally transfer some Bitcoin to somebody else, that transaction is permanent. And because it's a decentralized quote unquote, there is nobody to go to to say, hey, I accidentally transferred my money over to this other person. It's just gone. And it turns out that the ordinary financial system has a lot of checks and balances in place that make this. It certainly does happen at times, but there are a lot of ways to undo transactions when they are done accidentally. Right. And these are gone in the Bitcoin world. And in fact, one of the places they are gone that is most disturbing is if

you lose them, it is possible to lose your transactions in the Bitcoin world. You lose your wallet and some other ways you can lose it, and they're just gone. And the amount of Bitcoin that is now effectively lost, that nobody has any idea how to access and probably nobody ever will be able to access, forms a significant amount of the whole network. And I don't think there's anything close to it in raw terms, let alone percentage terms in the ordinary finance system, because it's just, unless you like literally lose some physical dollars, which certainly could happen. But even then it's often, you know, somebody is probably going to find it. But when you lose your Bitcoin, it's just gone. You don't erase it, but you have permanently put it in some

kind of transaction that nobody can figure out a way to access. So that sounds on the surface like you're offering people something good, but you are actually offering people something terrible through a kind of conspiratorial understanding of what it was they had in the first place. It is fascinating to watch people argue about credit card companies versus Bitcoin in social media because, you know, there are problems with the credit card companies, absolutely. But in general, the credit card companies have chargebacks, especially if you have a transaction of more than $50 that you can in any way show as a mistake, you will probably get your money back. And there's just nothing like that in Bitcoin. Whether or not that's a good feature, advertising it as a way that the

system is more trustworthy and more reliable than the other system is really a remarkable kind of turning the world upside down. You know, just briefly to go back to what you said about, you know, the decentralization and centralization within Bitcoin, it just reminds me of the internet itself in that, you know, it was promoted as this kind of decentralized network. But now we can see that just because there was an idea that decentralization would allow all of these kind of distributed and liberatory politics, we can see that it was very easy for corporate power to then centralize that network and take it over. And so it just feels like in some ways of a repetition of that. But you know, in the in the book, you you talked about how Bitcoin is not money, because it doesn't serve these important functions of being a medium of exchange, a store

value, a unit of account. And you know, there are a lot of ideas that you hear thrown around by people in Bitcoin circles about fiat currency and things like this, right? This broader discussion seems pretty important given that, you know, a country, El Salvador, has recently made a move to make Bitcoin legal tender itself. So I wanted to ask you, why is Bitcoin more of a commodity or a speculative asset? And what do you make of those recent events in El Salvador? I'll try to give the very short answer to the money part, because money is an abstract thing that is really hard to get your head around. The idea is that money, in the most abstract sense, is a way of quantifying what I owe you because you did something for me or gave something to me. And in that sense, it isn't even, you know, when we talk about something like the US dollar, we're talking about the currency in which money is denominated. But whether the US dollar

itself is what we mean by money, you could write entire treatises on this. So in the Bitcoin world, when they talk about Bitcoin becoming money, it's so hard to get your head around what they think that means, right? I've spent some time in the years since I wrote the book, like actually talking to scholars of money. And one of the only rules that people have kind of come around to is the idea that money is the name we give for the currency that a government will accept as the primary means of paying taxes. And even then, governments will sometimes accept property as forms of paying taxes. So does that mean a boat is money? So to claim that you're going to replace money, it's already such a hard idea to get one's head around if you really press into it.

And I don't know that it's what they mean, even though they do say it is money for the internet or whatever. They tend to mean currency. And currency is a little bit easier to get our head around. Currencies to be money tend to have those three functions that you mentioned, store of value, unit, account of medium of exchange. And it's certainly true that Bitcoin is the latest entry in a whole series of artificial currencies that the cypherpunks, which maybe we can talk about as kind of far-right political encryption advocates who have been trying to develop this stuff for a long time for explicitly anti-government reasons, it followed in the footsteps of some other famous currencies,

like the most famous is Liberty Reserve. There were some other ones. And the purpose of these currencies, beyond doubt, it was to purchase things that you didn't want to purchase with ordinary currency or with credit cards because your transactions would be followed by the government and what you were doing was illegal and you didn't want them to see that. Liberty Reserve was widely thought to just be used for buying drugs. And it is certainly true that Bitcoin in its early days had its first flourishing at the same time as the Silk Road, which was the first big dark web drug supermarket that people heard about. And at the same time as the Silk Road, which was the first big dark web drug supermarket that people heard about. And at the time, most of the transactions were performed in Bitcoin.

People mistakenly thought that Bitcoin transactions were anonymous, which turned out not to be the case and made it possible for law enforcement to go back and figure out who had actually been buying and selling drugs on the dark net. But right there, you see Bitcoin attempting to fulfill one of those functions, right? The medium of exchange, meaning it's the thing that you buy and sell other things in. And as a rule of thumb, you would like your medium of exchange to be stable in value relatively, right? You would like to be able to sell some stuff in May and then have the money at that point in May and then in September go and buy the same amount worth of stuff at that point. So having something that changes in value a lot, whether

it's going up or down, is bad as a medium of exchange because you can't price things the same. What was going to cost X in May is going to cost a completely different Y in September. And of course, the Silk Road had to constantly adjust its prices for Bitcoin's constant fluctuations in price. And it's closely tied to this store of value idea, because the store of value is I should be able to put $100 into something in May. And when I come back to it in September, it should be roughly worth $100. So I'm storing my value, making sure that my value stays what it was. I mean, it's wonderful if you store your value in something and you come back in three months and it's worth six times as much as it was in the first place. And if the world was built such that we could have assets that just went up exponentially arguments about why that can't happen. And ordinary history has some wonderful examples of why that doesn't happen. Those are called bubbles. And I don't know that people even can point at examples of bubbles that haven't burst,

but bubbles burst. That is a pretty ironclad law of markets. And just as a sort of rule of thumb, if you see something going up 600% in a few weeks, it's fair to guess that it might also go down. The equivalent would be 99% in a few weeks, which is, of course, exactly what happens to Bitcoin. Bitcoin people like to sell that volatility when it's going up. But of course, that volatility is just directly in contrast with its stated mission of being a medium of exchange. You know, that itself is already like there's a kind of sleight of hand going on, right? Because

the people who promote Bitcoin the most are actually, for the most part, not interested in its function as a medium of exchange. They are interested in it as an investment vehicle. They want to get rich with it. And because Bitcoin is not regulated in the way that the ordinary financial markets are, you can't be a journalist, for the most part, on Wall Street and write about stocks and hold the stocks that you write about. There's some very heavy regulations on that. And you will be at least fired from your job at Wall Street Journal if you are found to hold a lot of Apple while you talk about it. But in Bitcoin, that is the rule.

Almost all the people who write about Bitcoin are heavily invested in it. Almost all the publications that publish stuff about Bitcoin are run by people who have deep investments in Bitcoin. So the whole thing is just written with self-interest that is just not found in these other financial spheres. So what is happening now with Bitcoin and El Salvador and the guy in El Salvador? I think like almost all announcements that Bitcoin is going to do something remarkable. When you start to dig into it, you find that it's an announcement that Bitcoin is going to do something remarkable in the future, but it hasn't done it yet. And I think that is what we are seeing in El Salvador, as we see in most places. The fact that the guy in El Salvador is understood to be a kind of right-wing dictator doesn't surprise me. It's not that you couldn't have people of other political persuasions

recommending it, but it doesn't surprise me a lot. In general, I think that is the political orientation of a lot of the heaviest Bitcoin promoters. If I were to talk about recent developments, I guess the other one I would really want to mention is Tether. Tether, which is not well known outside of the Bitcoin world, but I think it is the place that I usually tell people who ask me about Bitcoin to look because Tether is the name of a quote-unquote stable coin. Tether is supposed to maintain a constant price of one US dollar per Tether coin. Tethers are not really minted on the blockchain. They are minted by this private company. They aren't used as a medium of exchange for the most part, despite the fact that they seem to have all the right characteristics to be a medium exchange because

they supposedly have a constant price. But that is the organization that the New York Attorney General has focused on in some of the more recent legal work on Bitcoin. And Tether, the company, is under an injunction from the New York Attorney General to provide pretty serious documentation of their business actions, in part because they have claimed since the company started that every $1 in Tether is backed by $1 in dollars or other hard assets that Tether maintains in its bank accounts. Interestingly, relying on the banking system that the Bitcoin people claim to hate and want to get out of, and also using the same model of backing that they often seem to really decry, and it's turned out that they've been lying. It doesn't actually have $1. It has maybe at most $0.80 on the dollar. And then a lot of the $0.80 are made up of pretty sketchy investments that are not dollars the way it claimed in the first place. There is a really disturbing coincidence between the issuing of tethers, which are issued in

just millions of dollars all the time, and the shape of the Bitcoin trading market. I mean, it looks like that market is just being flooded with these phantom dollars to keep it floating. A lot of us in this sort of critical community think that there is legal and regulatory action likely sooner rather than later relating not to Bitcoin directly, but to Tether and holding their feet to the fire as far as are those Tethers actually worth anything? And when it is really discovered that they aren't worth anything and that the company that issues them may have been engaged in some shady activities regarding the issuance of them and what they are for, that this could, along with some other things, really take the wind out of the sales of the Bitcoin market altogether.

And frankly, I think the market is so dominated by fraud that something like that both is kind of inevitable and also will be really welcome because I think ordinary people are in danger of losing a lot of assets if they start to try to invest in Bitcoin. You know, I think what you're describing there about Heather is really interesting. And I think bringing up so many of these criticisms of Bitcoin is definitely going to get us tired as no-coiners in the near future. But with what you're describing there, I feel like I'm sensing some connections to the past. You were talking about how you were first starting to pay attention to this in the earlier bubbles back in the early 2010s. And in the past year, we have seen another significant bubble in the price of Bitcoin that seems to be

crashing a bit now with actions from China and tweets from Elon Musk. But you also talked about how part of that was driven by the Silk Road and criminal activity that was happening with Bitcoins. And what we're seeing now, whether what you're discussing there with Tether or seeing cryptocurrencies being used to facilitate ransomware attacks in greater numbers. But I feel like one potential distinction there or one thing that really stands out is that it feels like a lot of these people who are really invested in Bitcoin, who, you know, promote it really regularly, are more openly championing kind of right wing politics in the sense that they're embracing this president of El Salvador, who is really right wing,

who was cracking down on the judiciary down there. And, you know, at the recent convention in Miami, you know, people were spouting these conspiracy theories that you're talking about around, you know, the history of central banking and money and things like that. So I guess what do you make of what we've been seeing in the past year in terms of the politics of Bitcoin and how it feels to me that there seems to be a more open championing of these right wing ideas that you're talking about. Yeah, it's really interesting.

And I don't want to say that I have a clear explanation for it, you know, and it definitely connects to the way a lot of right wing ideas are circulating in society right now, some of which have long kind of hid some of their deepest commitments. And in recent years, people have just sort of come right out and made them more clear. But that is not true across the board. Some people are still very cagey about what it is they believe. I have some guesses that I think some of the Bitcoin people may be starting to see some of the writing on the wall. And they figure that if they lay their cards on the table, they may get a few more hardcore people who will really want to buy that philosophy, who maybe are not as easily persuaded when the call to action

is more muted. It may also be that some of the more reasonable people have shaken out of the community a little bit. And so you're left with people who both are more ideologically committed to the project, but also who have more to lose if the project falls apart. And so they are becoming a little more strident. I certainly think that's part of what we saw in that Miami conference. There's a shamelessness to it. As you may know, if you follow the Bitcoin discussions on Reddit in particular and some other social media places, the need to keep this grift going is intense, such that one of the worst things you can do is go into some of the major Bitcoin subreddits and say something like, oh, I sold my Bitcoin and I made $15,000. Amazing. Which one might think would be positive for them. But the people who are the most heavily invested in

this whole thing, they need nobody to sell. They have their hashtag hold spelled H-O-D-L. And they have all recently switched their Twitter avatars to having, they call them laser eyes. To most people, they just look like red lights in their eyes, which are really, really creepy looking. And the laser eyes means you are somebody who holds with the intensity of a laser or something, and they cannot stand you selling your Bitcoin, even if you have made a huge profit in it, right? Which makes the no-coiner thing pretty ironic too, because they actually, they are making profits. In fact, I think we think they're making profits through Tether especially, but they actually don't want other people to make profits if that

involves selling, because selling is bad for them. It is interesting, right? In that Van Driesen interview that I've mentioned before, that he actually says outright that Bitcoin is a right-wing technology, which I seem to remember in the past arguing with him and people near him about, since that is obviously something I've been saying for a long time. And yet here they are coming right out and saying it quite openly. And that's a piece with some other parts of the technology world. In fact, we see Bitcoin promoted a lot on Clubhouse. And Clubhouse as a technology is probably not inherently right wing. It's just a way to talk to people. But in terms of the way it's marketed and used and the way people control it, it seems like it is heavily weighted toward the right wing. And they do some

pretty good work sort of policing it to make sure it stays that way. There's a kind of brazenness about all of that. It's concerning. As happy as I was that Trump lost the last election, the idea that that was the end of the kind of threat the far right poses to democracies in the world is false. I think the threat is still very, very real. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And unfortunately, there has been far too much of people believing that, you know, that threat is over just because Trump alone was voted out of office. But, you know, obviously, during this conversation, we talked a lot about the right wing ideas that are foundational to Bitcoin and to these technologies of the blockchain, cryptocurrencies,

things like that. But there are people on the left who would still argue that, you know, there's potential for Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain to be used toward left-wing ends. To close this conversation, what would you say to those people? And do you think that they have any valid points in saying that? In one way, that's who I wrote my book for, right? Because I really didn't think that I was going to convince right-wingers to not get into Bitcoin because it's right-wing. I think that's why they like it. So if anything, it was meant to alert the curious who are not aligned with the right wing to what is going on under the hood,

so to speak. This is one of the reasons why cyber libertarianism seems like such an important topic to me, because the persistence of belief among people who don't share these political foundations, but the attachment to the idea that these ideas can be recuperated or are politically neutral, or there's something wrong with noting that their foundation's in the right wing, it is really troubling. I see it a lot in the academy, right? I mean, I get a lot of pushback for my work. And most of the people I work with are not in the more political parts of the academy, like literary studies, media studies, so forth, and are often not in the academy at all. And there's this sort of, I talk about it sometimes as a yes, but, yes, everything you say is right, but couldn't we do this with it? And I hear that and I'm like,

I am trying so hard to argue against that particular move. Why do you want to look at this stuff that was like literally built by Nazis in order to realize their goals and say, well, there's a way we can repurpose it for us? That just seems like a wrong place to start. And to be frank, when I talk with some of these people who have these ideas, their understanding of both the history of Bitcoin and blockchain and of economics is often pretty thin. They end up spouting a lot of the same stuff I read on the cypherpunk mailing list. And you read in the writings of the pretty Florida right-wing people,

and just like, you're not really grounding this in a way that I find convincing, or that even escapes the basic problems that I've laid out in the first place that there was a lot of anti-government rhetoric. There's a lot of conspiratorial talk about the Federal Reserve and central banking. And it is by people who say that they are on the left. And then you have to argue with them about, well, why do you think these ideas even fit with the left at all? Let me modulate that just slightly by saying it isn't as if it is currently possible to build a technology that kind of prohibits any use that is not 100% ideologically aligned with the goals of its developers, right?

And I think that is probably a good thing. I would fear that. There are trivial ways. I mean, if you make $10,000 in Bitcoin and you give it to a bail fund or something or Black Lives Matter, you've done some good work for some causes that I agree with, and you've used Bitcoin to do it. But does that, to me, make a case that this technology is actually something we should be spending our time working on? It does not. It doesn't even make the case

that somebody somewhere down the line hasn't been ripped off of that same $10,000 and maybe it would have been good not to rip them off, although we could argue about that. It seems really counterproductive. In some of my other writing, I'd say, let's talk about what we are trying to do politically. Then we can talk about what the means are to get there. But the focus on stuff like Bitcoin often seems like it is putting that in reverse. Let's look at this tool, and then we'll see what this tool allows us to do. And we can get to the politics we want from that direction. And I think that is almost always a mistake for a lot of reasons, but especially because

these technologies are often built by people with very political goals that most of us on the left do not agree with at all. And fortunately, these people's own idea of politics is very inchoate and not well thought through, and it doesn't work perfectly the way that they might want it to. But it still seems like the wrong direction to go in. The right direction is, what are the policies? What are the programs? What are the laws? What are the norms that we want to have in place? And let's work on building them.

And sure, all kinds of technologies and media and so forth are going to be useful in that. But that's not what we should be focusing on. Our focus should be on the ends we are trying to achieve. I completely agree. And I think what you're describing there just shows how pervasive these right-wing ideas are in our society today, that they can be disconnected from their histories and people can believe that they can be seized for left-wing ends when, you know, they have these histories that they don't fully understand and that lead them to then believe things that are not in the pursuit of, you know of the kind of world and the kind of politics that we would ultimately want to see. David, I think this has been a really enlightening conversation, a really interesting conversation that has shed a lot of light on the actual politics of Bitcoin

and cryptocurrencies. So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and to talk to me about this. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. David Columbia is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of The Politics of Bitcoin, Software as Right-Wing Extremism. You can follow David on Twitter at at D Columbia. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us.

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