Crypto functions as a utopian reaction to technofeudalism
Evidence
Thomas More wrote his eponymous Utopia in the sixteenth century as a thought experiment in how to cure the evils of the feudal order (in which, it must be said, he played a prominent part). Half a century later, Tommaso Campanella published his own Utopia, The City of the Sun, as a polemic against the prominent Aristotelian view that anyone doing manual labour should be denied full citizenship. He counter-argued that it was the artisans and the builders, not the parasitic feudal classes, who ought to have political power. Today’s evangelical advocates of crypto technologies – with their faith that Wall Street, cloudalists, governments, the deep state, the entire technofeudal order can be brought down by smart computer code and unhackable proof-of-work algorithms – are today’s economic utopians, and crypto is as much a reaction to technofeudalism as the original Utopia was a reaction to feudalism. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 677
Categorization
- XREF: Parallel to earlier reading on Utopia and early modern political thought in the library texts. — connects to: Technofeudalism extends alienation from labor’s products to ownership of minds — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 774; Crypto’s libertarian faction captured it and issued their own fiat currency — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 686; Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284 (+3 more)
- DEFINE: Sets up the comparative frame that defines technofeudalism’s structural kin (feudalism) and crypto’s role as reaction.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 677
Broader Connections
- Utopian techno rhetoric is strategic propaganda that legitimates surveillance capitalism’s drive toward totality
#complicates(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1284