Blockchains are Leaded Gasoline

We’re firing ourselves into the void on a contrail of hot math. The dark comedy that is existence provides us a really good yuck as it watches another species fail to navigate the great filter. In this case, we’re gonna heat the atmosphere past the return point by burning an absolutely impossibly colossal amount of compute, resources, and energy infrastructure to try to do big math so that some rich guy doesn’t have to degrade himself to the tier of pretending he exists in a society in order to evade taxes.

There is a coolness in blockchains; the ability to put up an immutable log of all the places people have gotten owned by Ponzi scams. And that, in an of itself, is something beautiful – the shared belief that in this capitalist hellhole, someone was going to make you a lot of money because you were going to make them a lot of money, and somehow you weren’t gonna get hurt in the process. How fragile and beautiful the optimism within a human! Even as he turns the crank in the system that consumes him, he thinks “but with this revolution, I am master of the crank!”.

Anyways, it turns out immutability doesn’t something from disappearing when people decide to stop believing in it, so in a way, blockchains extremely American Gods – immutable and all powerful, but only as long as someone is investing. Even ozymandius had it more figured out than that.

The funniest part of it all though, is that people act like decentralized technology isn’t some libertarian fanfic, and that the problem is that the power is centralized, not that the power itself seeks to maintain itself through whatever means necessary. Blockchain technologies exist only as arbitrage functions between other things in society, they have no value except as sycophantic hangers on to fiat currency, a jpeg, or the belief between two people in their shared digital IOU.

The last one is actually pretty interesting, but unfortunately, will be sundered apart because the best dreams that those with power can come up with now are:

• Fly a dick into space
• Snowcrash was p cool?

And as with all things in capitalism, the shallow, rotted brains of the owner class are what will prevent blockchain tech from being introspected and realized into something meaningful – a perfectly smooth, polished surface that we could hold up as a mirror to ourselves, to trust, to care in society. But no, we’re gonna drive the stakes of capital into it and then let the rich shit themselves to death at the top while the rest of us play pachinko on the eventual landing point of their filth.

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