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The superficial contradictions of Web3 discourse, with which we concluded the first part of this book, might be represented in the form of a ghastly diptych. On the one hand there would be its ostentatiously utopian facet, extolling the virtuous brotherhood of renewed pioneering, smooth-skinned entrepreneurs breaking loose from time-worn structural constraints, smug in the prospect of technological solutions paving the way for unlimited expansion: salvation. On the other, we would contemplate a murkier scene, featuring seemingly endless strings of ones and zeros and erratic spikes and dips of valuation charts, pixelated faces contorted by terror and greed, and the indistinct bodies of living beings hurled into the whirlwind of a tornado funnel: sacrifice. Both the utopian and the dystopian panels would align in perspective, their objects surging upwards in their involuntary or desired ethereal ‘escape’ from material relations of production. Both resolutely represent the primal veil that must be drawn aside if humankind is to be restored to the mercy of the natural world – if we are to overcome the separation between nature and society that Alfred Sohn-Rethel theorises. Elsewhere, in probably more familiar verse, Leonard Cohen beckons us:

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in (Cohen, 1992).

Cohen’s “perfect offering” derides a sacrifice that never should have been, a fraudulent ‘ideal’ that humanity can but fail to achieve. The “perfect offering” is but a token of the abstract unity in the garden of Eden that human belief systems have futilely attempted to rebuild, just as in Christianity, Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice (Hebrews 10:14), supposedly replacing those earlier ‘flawed’ human offerings which Robert Kurz links to the origins of money. Cohen subverts this: just forget it! He rejects the delusion that we can (or should) return to a state of ‘purity’. No sacrifice can undo the ‘fall’; instead embrace brokenness as the path to grace, embrace the cracks! Deeply versed in Kabbalah, he is of course referring to the notion of the ‘shattering of the vessels’ (Shevirat HaKelim) describing the containers of divine light fracturing at creation – without which the unbroken radiance of the Eternal would have overwhelmed all, leaving no space for the fertile tension between light and dark, good and evil, which makes human agency possible. It is this very autonomy that allows us to conceive of cracks – interstices through which an emancipatory ‘light’ can come again and begin to erode the general process of ideologisation – that permeate Web3 discourse and practice. Yet, however real that autonomy of cultural forms (as noted with Nicholas Garnham), the erosion can only become effective once transformed into social forms of relations of production, where humans might “engage in production and consumption as communal activities” to briefly quote Sohn-Rethel, and where “humans’ relationship with nature forms an indissoluble unity with their relationships among themselves” (Sohn-Rethel, op. cit: 66). Bear with me – we’ll get there.

Meanwhile, steadily bringing the ethereal flight back down to ground, let’s briefly consider one other often neglected aspect of its eschatological and sacrificial versions – or perhaps where the two do blend, in sum. In an interview given around the period of Covid-19 lock-downs, professor of marketing and consumption James Fitchett echoed one of Slavoj Zizek’s well-known proposals:

“We have utopian narratives today, but we do not seem to have utopian action. What I mean is that we can imagine brave new futures in which artificial intelligence or genetic engineering or some other advanced form of technology completely transforms our world, satisfying all our desires, eradicating the mundanity of work, and healing us of all ills. But these grand utopias are just that, they are grand and imaginary [but] they will not impact most of us. (…) Now, the problem is that utopia is actually then somewhat of an anticlimax.” (Bradshaw et al., 2021: 520-521).

“Given the choice between wanting to indulge in dystopian visions or utopian ones, the dystopian ones are far, far more valuable. They are far more attractive and ultimately, they are much more desirable. Which is why (...) it is far easier for us to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Somewhere in the unconscious, but not so deep down, this is what we really desire and this is what we invest in the market for.” (Ibid.: 523).

Where the two merge – conjuring up unsavoury images of a grinning Samuel Bankman-Fried, shortly before his demise and prison selfies beside Diddy, praising a Ponzi scheme’s ability to go on forever (in essence, the same illusion that you encounter all through the short history of Internet, although somewhat exacerbated here, that belief in endless resources disconnected from materiality) –, where sacrifice and salvation blend, can be found in the accelerationist tropes that “see this dystopia as an actual utopia in the sense that the only way you could expect to see any change is a complete reconfiguration of thinking within capitalism (...) not to resist capital, but to rather accelerate its paradoxical tendencies to the point of collapse, or at least to the point of complete reconsideration of the entire system we live in.” (Ibid.: 520). Hence Web3 practice takes on the form of a depressive lurch into the ‘ethereal’ realm, as an unconscious (or falsely conscious) reaction to the prevalent apocalyptic and victimary theme of ‘the end of the world’. The general unease with the existing civilisational order, the ‘disruptive’ drive, widespread distrust of dominant liberal media narratives (often including that of climate change); all these elements are distinctly present in the discourse of blockchain agitators. They corroborate the hypothesis that Web3 practice may offer participants a form of ‘engagement’ (as we saw with the impassioned accounts a Web3 promotional agent gave of youngsters spending long hours on collective blockchain governance tasks). It might well be considered in relation to other forms of ‘immobilisation’ resulting from the broader conditions that Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam refers to here:

“The most disastrous element in global mobilisation at the present time is the inability to radicalise global youth. People promote the world youth for rising up and influencing climate change. However, I think the international youth are totally disorganised, totally ineffectual and totally demoralised given the objectivity of the injustice being impacted upon them. I think in terms of Western societies (…) the youth spaces are dominated by a completely ineffectual therapeutic organisation of politics, which has the counterintuitive consequence of demoralising, depressing and individualising the suffering of youth, which is what therapeutic action is. It’s basically a post-war strategy of demoralising and dividing rule and atomising people and creating a narcissism of the self. To my mind, this is an imposed ideology by the dominant sort of left space, which is all about victimisation, suffering, trigger warnings and all the rest of it.” (Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2023b: 244).

The underlying malaise that we encountered in the first part of the book – in the particular ideologisation processes of those ‘small-hands’ of Web3; all that addiction, burn-out and pill-popping – is in this respect just as symptomatic as the countless “exit fantasies” churned out by Web3 audience labour and its professional ‘ideologues’. The authors of “Building Blockchain Frontiers” thus recount the efforts of the now sanctified Silicon Valley figure Stewart Brand and somewhat less prominent crypto propagandist Jeff Berns. Their contributions to a specific Ethereum conference illustrate how they both “appeal to the idea of sidestepping the problematic existing infrastructures (...) and developing their own sort of a physical instantiation of the hopes built into the blockchain itself” (Brody et al., op. cit.: 4175). The authors further suggest that “the name ‘Ethereum’ carries with it a transcendental connotation itself, where the technology is imagined as a type of computer network that resides in no particular location while simultaneously denoting an ‘all-encompassing’ and ubiquitous quality to it” (Ibid.: 4176). Such an admittance might well have led them to conclusions other than suggesting how “design prototypes and public engagement methods can help move blockchain imaginaries beyond either dystopian or techno-utopian frames” (Ibid.: 4176-4177) – but yet again this article graces us with wishful thinking and the mandatory proposal for future ‘research’ focusing on how Ethereum could nonetheless provide some bliss in “real-world relationships and modes of governance for participants in its ecosystem” (Ibid.: 4177). Oh, scholarly articles and their meticulous pursuit of genteel consensus! Oh, the sheer terror of value, rather – the terrified misrecognition of the conditions of collective emancipation, of the very prospect of relations of material production that might be freed from the grip of commodity fetichism. So it is our unterrifying task, indeed, to drive home how value, whether in its guise of ‘beliefs’, ‘signs’ or in the primeval shapes of tokens or recordings of debt on a proto-ledger, will not endlessly be an indispensable and inherent corollary to material relations of production

This brings us back to the descendants of Fleuriau and consorts – our present coterie of reasonable French business leaders and benevolent extreme centre politicians, busy heating the seats for the successors of those forgotten Waffen SS Division Charlemagne combatants Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier. It’s summertime as I write these lines and as usual, they’re keenly discussing what can or cannot be tolerated on ‘French soil’ of youngsters with dark or darker skin complexions; last night, once again, numerous local authorities imposed curfews on persons aged under sixteen, enclosing the ‘ensavaged’ youths to make sure they respect les valeurs de la République. In the city of Nîmes, six specific neighbourhoods are concerned (I’ll let you imagine the ‘demographics’); the North Parisian suburb of Saint Ouen lists the names of eighty-six streets where under-sixteens may not walk between 11.30pm and 6am, lest they be carted off to the nearest police station and their parents duly fined 150€. Sifting through the local legal decrees – all purportedly taken to protect the population from drug-traffic related criminality – it wouldn’t at all be surprising to find that some cities allow youths carrying a form of token to freely circulate, like the “certificates for exceptional travel” that French citizens could print, sign and carry with them to justify leaving their homes during the 2020-21 Covid-19 lockdowns. All this surely reeks of the ‘state of exception’ emergency legislation that Robert Kurz rightly describes as designed for “human material no longer suitable for valorisation” (Kurz, op. cit.: 409), the repressive arsenal which is brought out at the slightest pretext of any disorganised popular riposte. When protests erupted on the streets of French suburbs following the killing of Nahel Merzouk, shot at point blank by a police officer in the town of Nanterre in June 2023, the liberal guard dogs of value’s rotten order were swift to condemn the actions of the youth as being beyond political action. Luc Bronner, senior reporter and editorial director of the newspaper Le Monde from 2015 to 2020, a self-styled expert on the problems of the banlieues, thus confirmed the ‘analysis’ of a fellow journalist on French public radio, claiming that “Nahel’s death, which was initially a genuine source of motivation, may have sometimes served as a mere pretext in the following days”:

“This is often the case during phases of violence, whether in the suburbs or other sectors – with the gilets jaunes, for example, we saw similar things. Agricultural protests can also be very intense. For me, there was indeed a tipping point three days after this young man’s death under such tragic circumstances – the moment when things escalated into large-scale looting across many towns in France. And it’s true that looting, obviously, makes it harder to discern a political dimension, whereas rioting can be a way of expressing anger or frustration.”²

Such a forceful argument eerily echoes Adorno’s observation that “the system can make exceptions and, for a change, once tolerate what is not like it; when things get serious, it does not allow people to joke around with it.” (Adorno, 1994: 205). The act of looting – in effect an assault on humdrum valorisation by those very unvalorisable rejects of contemporary capitalism – is indeed the ultimate intolerable gesture. This is the case, especially, as collective trespassing and theft of commodities is generally accompanied by an outpouring of jouissance that the system rightly recognises as antithetical to its dominant political codes – delimited by victimisation, identity-based grievance, self-harm, and gentle petitioning of the prince. By extension, Roger Hallam points to the difficult task of recruiting marginalised youth to his own strand of revolutionary politics, empowering “working class youth and regional lower middle-class youth who haven’t been infected with this reactionary ideology and [enabling] them to go out and enjoy resistance”:

“The religious dogma of the radical left is that joy is taboo, right? Enjoyment. It’s pure Calvinism and it’s no surprise that it’s encouraged by the same class that is the traditional Calvinist class, which is the urban professional middle class. This is revolting structurally and culturally, I think, to working class youth, which is why working-class youth are completely alienated from political space, because they are excluded by middle class from participation, through this imposed ideology of middle-class etiquette.” (Karatzogianni & Matthews, op. cit.: 244-245).

Grounding the ‘ethereal’ flight of Web3 encadrement³ and, on a much broader level, preparing for the landing that theory must enact in order to penetrate the masses and become a material force (to paraphrase a well-known formula), will of course require the smashing of that taboo, and of the widespread vestiges of christian dogma that encumber the political field, via the persistent hold of liberal and social-democrat ‘etiquette’. Yet attacking specific superficial cultural forms will never suffice; what fundamentally guides this task is the recognition that the production of the living and the production of value are irreconcilable. By this, I obviously don’t mean the obsessional abstract celebration of individual human life – and all its contemporary, foolish and fearful off-shoots, from cryogenics to space colonisation, from botox to post-apocalypse bunkers, from Bitcoin to immigration walls. I mean the production of the well-being of living forms – flora, fungi and fauna – inherently tied to the solar-sustained workings of precipitation and landform, upon which all depend, and which must be met with technologies that honour rather than override their foundational rhythms.

In a rather distinct political context, writer and engineer in the field of hydraulics and electrical production Andrei Platonov was perhaps one of the first to point us in this direction, in the early 1930s. His short essay “On The First Socialist Tragedy” (Platonov, 1934 / 2013: 153-159)⁴ contains a decisive development that I include at length, before offering some modest elements of commentary.

“Nature is not great and is not abundant. Or – to be more precise – her design is so rigid that she has never yet yielded her greatness and abundance to anyone. And this is a good thing; otherwise – in historical time – we would long ago have looted and squandered all nature; we would have got drunk on her right through to her very bones. We would always have had appetite enough. Had the physical world been without what is, admittedly, its most fundamental law – the law of the dialectic – it would have taken people only a few centuries to destroy the world completely and to no purpose. More than that, in the absence of this law, nature would have annihilated herself to smithereens even without any people. The dialectic is probably an expression of miserliness, of the almost insuperable rigidity of nature’s construction – and it is only thanks to all this that humanity’s historical development has been possible. Otherwise everything would long ago have come to an end on this earth – like a game played by a child with sweets that melt in his hands before he has even had time to eat them. Where lies the essence of the contemporary historical tragedy? It lies, in my view, in the fact that “technology decides everything”. The relationship between nature and technology is, in principle, tragic. The class struggle, the question of the defense of the USSR and victory over imperialism, is now also, above all, a matter of technology. (…) The working class, having spent an entire century working on the sheer substance of nature, has acquired such a creative technological potential that now, ennobled by socialism, it is constructing a technology capable, in the course of one or two decades, of making this class into the mind of nature, with absolute power in practical dimensions. But man himself changes more slowly than he changes the world. This is the center of the tragedy. This is why we need creative engineers of human souls. They must prevent the danger of the human soul being left far behind by technology. Even now man is no longer on the same level as history. In the optimal conditions for technical progress that exist in our country, we live on the eve of a substantive conquest of the world – on the eve of the regulation of all the world’s processes, until now spontaneous, that are of practical importance to us. Yes, but contemporary man, even his very best representatives, is inadequate. He is not armed with the kind of soul, the kind of heart and consciousness that will one day allow him, finding himself at the head of nature, to fulfill his duty and heroic deed to the end and not destroy, for the sake of some psychological game, the entire construction of the world and his own self. Here the dramatic situation has a purely Soviet content, a content that is purely ‘ours’. Socialism can be seen as the tragedy of the soul under tension, trying to overcome its own wretched poverty, in order that the most distant future should be insured against catastrophe. In the formula about the engineers of human souls is hidden the theme of the first purely socialist drama. In a few years this problem will become more important than metallurgy; all science, technology, and metallurgy – all our weapons of power over nature – will be of no use if they are inherited by an unworthy society. More than this, an imperfect Man will then create out of history such a tragedy without end and without resolution that his own heart will grow tired. But this will not happen if we work now. If we become real engineers and inventors of human souls – rather than their ‘foremen’. To carry out this task, we must first of all create a socialist soul within our own selves. I once saw, amid the Soviet intelligentsia, how a young woman had been made to feel sad. She was an extraordinarily gifted chemist, but she was plain. Everyone was having a merry time in a summer garden, but no one was paying attention to her as a woman and comrade. Everyone was throwing summer flowers and confetti around, but she was sitting awkwardly to one side, alien and alone. The celebration continued further into the evening. Then this young woman secretly gathered up flowers and scraps of paper that had fallen near her neighbors, went away with them into the darkness, behind the trees, scattered them over her own hair and neck, and came back smiling, her eyes shining through tears. When she was still at a distance, a handsome and brilliant young engineer rose to his feet to meet her and, red with shame, began to dance with her, and to spend all that remained of the evening with her. None of this is good. A man of socialist soul would have noticed this woman before she went into the garden to weep and scatter scraps of paper over herself.”

I do not cite these startling lines merely for the fleeting glimpse they offer of a profoundly tense and hopeful historical occasion. Platonov states in this same text that “ideology is located not on some external height, not in the ‘superstructure’, but in the very heart of man and of his social feeling” (Ibid.: 155). What the writer is referring to there – albeit specifically in a moment where the prospect of ‘worthy society’ appears to him as attainable – is the fundamental importance of each and every particular ideologisation process. All are simultaneously permeated by, and feed into, mediations of relations of material production; every grasped as a whole, ideologisation is thus a dynamic and evolutive phenomenon that can never be ‘(super)structurally’ fixed. Moreover, he asserts that the cancellation of ideology can never come in the form of an edict by some external political or intellectual authority: ultimately, making the working class into “the mind of nature”, to use Platonov’s own words, or resolving what he calls the theme of “history as a universal tragedy”, are necessarily material evolutions. The dissolution of the central abstract force of commodity exchange and its corollary separation between intellectual and manual labour – that which upholds the tragedy of the bourgeois mind against nature – is conditioned by the relationship between nature and technology, and how humans – from Platonov’s timely viewpoint – may or may not be collectively capable of effectively engineering a ‘socialist soul’, for which technology will not merely constitute a ‘weapon of power over nature’. At the close of this short essay, we observe the gifted yet plain chemist retiring to scatter over herself flowers and scraps of paper, that the cultural apprentices of socialism had discarded. She has been excluded from the group, and is reduced to solitary – even secret – self-gratification, showering her head and neck with petals and scraps of confetti – an image that conjures up the whirling of paper money, tokens. The comrade who suddenly witnesses this terrible occurrence finds himself in a state of anxious remorse: they are allowing the separation of individual producers to endure in this time of socialist construction, renewing the cult of isolated ‘reward’ and its fundamental denial of the dialectic of nature. In this regard, Platonov’s parable affirms the necessary task of de-ideologisation, ‘engineering’ of the human soul, beyond any crude belief in technology – lest we engender “a tragedy without end and without resolution”; it is a call to reflect both on the importance of extra-human ‘partners’ in material relations of production and on how these last evolve diachronically, with regard to ideologisation processes marked by the plurimillenary domination of value abstraction. This is a specific problem that Alfred Sohn-Rethel also underlines:

“Abolition of private capital by the abrogation of its property rights does not automatically dispose of the antithesis of intellectual and manual labour. If this antithesis remains in being it makes for the continuation of an antagonistic society. Only conscious political action by the revolutionary forces can overcome this obstacle to socialism and make the direct, producers the power that masters, handles and develops the means of production. Otherwise the development and disposal of the forces of social production remain the privilege of scientists and technologists, of experts and specialists who, enmeshed with a vast bureaucracy of administrators, carry on a reign of technocracy.” (Sohn-Rethel, op. cit.: 177-178).

Significantly, Sohn-Rethel adds that they key difference between socialist and capitalist relations of production resides in the relationship of society to nature:

“Whereas in capitalism the existing technology serves as machinery for the exploitation of one class of society by another, in socialism it must be made the instrument of the relationship of society to nature. If present advanced technology does not allow for such a change then it must be transformed and freed from the adverse elements and the power structure ingrained in it. To speak with Ernst Bloch, the science and technology of our age rule over nature like ‘an occupying army in enemy country’, whereas in socialism we must aim to establish ‘an alliance of society with nature’. This cannot be done by dispensing with science, but demands the aid of a science backed by the unity of mental and manual work.” (Ibid.: 180-181. The quotation is from Bloch, 1959: 786).

Once more, recall with Sohn-Rethel how the development of technology has thus far been intrinsically linked to commodity exchange and abstract social relations – a society in which the circulation of commodities constitutes the link between all material things is an abstract society; this is a first, fundamental ‘divorce’ from nature, which one can but link to the core proposition that Adorno and Horkheimer formulate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, of the fundamental rupture that human thought enacts as it gradually attempts to exert and extend control of internal and external nature, with animism, mythology, religion, metaphysics, philosophy and ultimately with instrumental reason – all ‘progressions’ of intellectual labour’s dominating and exclusionary drive. The divorce from nature is compounded by the separation of manual and intellectual labour – the root of all technological ‘progress’ – while dominant cultural forms simultaneously promote a way of thinking based on ‘private’ individuals, isolated from one another.

This way of thinking pervades the current victimary ‘denunciation’ of climate change and its catastrophic consequences. The stories devised and narrated by the ruling class are all about an abstract humanity, selfishly trying to hedge its bets, signing up to vain pledges of percentage points of emissions increase as if to save its honour, with no true regard for the whole wide world of fauna, fungi, flora and mineral. Web3 is inevitably rife of such stories – moss.earth tokenising carbon credits as NFTs on the blockchain, originally on Ethereum, now on Celo for lower emissions; klimadao.finance, providing a decentralised currency where tokens are backed by real carbon offsets; treejer.com, a blockchain-based reforestation protocol that connects donors directly to local planters; regen.network, a blockchain for ecological assets, tracking land regeneration and carbon sequestration, allowing farmers to earn crypto rewards for sustainable practices, to cite but a few. They stink of the fundamentally selfish outlook of those particularly vocal elements of the encadrement class, privileged ranters of ‘post-industrial’ nations, driving their electric cars to plastic and cardboard recycling stations with a belly full of smoothie and organic soya steak, obsessed with their identities, smug in the knowledge that forever at Waitrose they’ll find that fine, chilled mist about the shiny fruit and veg. From an ever younger age, this way of thinking splinters our own natural and social selves – red pillers thundering against normies, masculinists raging against ‘male disposability’ while feminists fight against masculine linguistic generics, the moralistic crusade of the so-called Left against Trump and his gang, Khayelitsha tsotsis against Cape-town high-voltage wire, humans struggling against their own physical selves, pick the odd one out; countless heinous accusations of the Other doing ‘ideology’, endless displaced fervour and energy of course, where the project of emancipating humanity appears to have been definitively shelved. The ‘legitimate’, institutionally proclaimed, intellectuals, those producers of cultural forms that occupy official positions within academia, are by no means immune to this way of thinking; indeed one might well consider how social and human sciences have massively adopted and encouraged it over the past three decades. The post-modernist turn in cultural studies is just one incarnation of this general tendency to celebrate the affirmation of ‘identities’ and their ‘values’, the superficial ‘pleasure’ associated with so-called ‘subversive’ cultural practices, as if the central antagonism of class society, the irreconcilable conflict between labour and capital, had already been resolved. With a curious sort of false naivety, well-fed academia appears to ‘think’ and ‘act’ as if a stage of historical development attainable only through the abolition of class itself – the end of the separation between intellectual and manual labour – had already, magically taken place. In a remarkable and predictably under-circulated academic article, Adam Katz examines the developments and implications of the culturalist (im)posture. Having recalled that the category of labour in Marxism evidently does not project an ‘identity’ but accounts for the basis of the capitalist social order, thereby explaining “what subjects – however they ‘identify’ themselves – are struggling over and why”, he points to how the ‘anti­authoritarian’ opposition to vanguardist politics advanced by Laclau and Mouffe (widely accepted as dogma in contemporary social science) has thus “really advanced in the interest of preventing [revolutionary] knowledges from being publicized and thereby making social transformation possible”

“Contrary to the economistic understandings of class which writers like Hall ‘accept’ in order to dismiss, Marxism understands classes not only as a position within an economic system but in relation to the antagonistic possibilities regarding the arrangement of the entire social, political and cultural order which follow from the class struggle. The primacy of working class power in Marxist theory and practice (...) is not a result of the exceptional degree of suffering experienced by the working class, or any moral virtues they possess, but the fact that the proletariat ‘organized as the ruling class’ represents the potential for exploiting the socialization of the forces of production created by capitalism in the interests of freer, more democratic and egalitarian social relations. However, this criterion regarding the possibilities represented by any struggle or agent is excluded from the category of identity, which can only reverse the criteria or values contained in the dominant system. This idealizes those agents in the form in which the dominant culture has produced them, leading to a utopian or moralizing politics. ‘Destabilization’, which opens the possibility of local reversals and revaluations in the interest of a more favorable insertion within the existing order, becomes the limit of oppositional politics. (…) The postmodern critique of the universal subject of classical liberal theory and the universal subject of social rights of social democracy in fact reinscribes the internal homogeneity of the subject in the space of representation: as opposed to the right to liberty granted the classical liberal subject, or the right to need satisfaction granted the social democratic subject, the postmodern liberal subject is granted the right to the formation of identities and representations with a determinate social value: to put it another way, the ‘right to recognition’. The deconstruction of identities and representations avoids the crude biological and humanistic essentialism of previous liberalisms by not attributing to any particular subject any single fixed identity. However, by keeping the category of ‘identity’ intact as the ‘unstable’ ground of politics, it simply allows for greater flexibility by supporting a mode of politics which enables the discarding and appropriation of identities in accord with global fluctuations and changing articulations of ‘private individuality’ and collective or public modes of subjectivity. The subject, for postmodernism, is always already implicated in a set of discourses and relations, is always situated (unlike the abstract classical liberal subject). However, this situation is itself abstracted from the globalization of capitalist relations, and involves the immediate appropriation of the materials of experience (the securing of identities) through local articulations of ‘identity’. (Ibid.: 15-16).

Katz rightly analyses the postmodern turn, and its pervasive infiltration of academia, as “a new logic of the social governed by the incommensurability of different language games and postmodern theories of the public sphere (as the articulation of differences) which abstract from the contradiction between the forces and relations of production and class struggle and situate ‘politics’ as the arena in which ‘identities’ and ‘experiences’ are constructed and negotiated” (Ibid.: 17). Connecting post-marxist ‘understandings’ of the social order and the abstract ‘communicative’ theories of ‘democracy’ (all those vaporous ‘theories’ stemming from Habermas’s initial takeoff), this allows for “an amorphous ‘progressive’ politics which can evade the centrality of conflict between contending social forces as the ground of social transformation” (Ibid.). The so-called ‘performative’ power of identity-situated mindsets, representations and memes further compounds the magic solution.

This way of thinking also dominates scholarly analysis of Web3, as I’ve shown with numerous illustrations, all through this book. I nonetheless offer one last example of how even the most supposedly critical appraisals of this field slide into similarly abstract terms, as we witness with the following exchanges between Law scholar Primavera De Filippi and the editor of the podcast ‘The Blockchain Socialist’, Joshua Dávila – both attempting to “overthrow” former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivassan’s wholly exclusionary prose:

Primavera: “I don’t think we have any particular claim about what is right or wrong, it’s just that we have different values, and we want to dig into what it is in this book that goes against some of our values or some of our beliefs but also attempt to explore and discuss with people that might agree in order to identify (sic) maybe there is meat in these arguments that we’re not capable of seeing, but also try to extrapolate from those discussions, with the people that might agree and the people that might disagree, extrapolate something that maybe everyone has in common (…). Is there an underlying principle that somehow Balaji is tapping into with The Network State? And we want to bring these underlying principles forward in order to make it clear that the network state is only one out of several instances of this principle, opening up and paving the way for different instances of this same underlying concept. (…) Even though there are so many flaws in his framework, the memetic power even just of the name The Network State is so powerful that many people are just willing to abide to it just because they love the name. That’s where I think it is important to overthrow that: we need to either identify all the flaws of that particular framework so that The Network State is no longer that salient, or we need to create an alternative meme so that there’s this kind of meme war between those different concepts trying to instantiate something that people resonate with. And I think it’s okay to have the notion of the network state, and I’m sure some people do resonate with that particular thing but the problem is that many people resonate with something else, and because there is only one meme, then they just resonate with the meme, and I think we need a plurality of memes, a diversity of frameworks so you can choose your meme and abide by the one you believe in. Joshua: Yeah, we’re engaging in memetic warfare, we’re declaring memetic warfare (laughter).” (Dávila & De Filippi, 2023a).

In a further edition, the two again discuss Srinivassan’s pamphet, this time alongside independent researcher Wassim Alsinidi. He points here to the fact that “Bitcoin created digital scarcity”:

Wassim: “We didn’t really have that before. That is its move. Bitcoin is just about digital scarcity, pretty much: 21 million, that’s all its about. The shadow of that logic is cast over just about everything in the space. And I know Josh, that you do experiments with different kinds of logics being instantiated but it’s the scarcity mindset in the physical realm that we need to find alternatives to, to help people imagine different kinds of futures.” Primaverra: “That’s what we’re doing with Coordi-Nations, actually. (…) Thinking about how do you fight against Capital, it’s very hard, because the whole of society has been crafted around Capital, as the fundamental resources. And The Network State is a very salient alternative because it is actually perfectly aligned with the liberal capitalist society that we live in. Coordi-Nations is trying to show that the only reason that scarcity exists is because we are living in this liberal, capitalist society and that if we start acting in a different manner, we might actually reduce scarcity, because we can pool resources and can start sharing resources and supporting each other in ways that don’t have to go through the market system, because we are part of this particular Coordi-Nation so we are finding ways in order to mutualise resources. And this is actually, I think, a prophecy, for those that understand (…) that Capital is useful in this society but might be less useful in a different society. (…) Instead of focusing on the truth, what is right and what is wrong, what is correct and what is false, I think it’s more ‘what is a future that is sufficiently salient for a portion of people to choose to change their behaviour today in order to ensure that this prophecy (…) becomes a reality?’” Wassim: “So we need to unlock the memes of production to create the Coordi-Nation-state reality that we want to see in the world.” (laughter) Joshua: “My feeling is that it’s about recognising the abundance we already live in. As part of the scarcity mindset, we’re constantly reminded that things are scarce. You have to pay money to buy things, everything’s paywalled, but being able to create the social organisations that help us bring to surface the abundance that we already have, which I think includes just not using Capital as a way to organise with one another, a way to coordinate. It requires a mind shift, and there’s also a need for literally changing the material conditions for that to happen. Yeah, we need memes of abundance.” (Dávila & De Filippi, 2023b).

Although Joshua Dávila rightly points to the importance of “material conditions”, it is baffling to see how these theorists – who claim to contribute to a socialist analysis and/or revolutionary praxis rooted in the principles of the commons – end up celebrating ‘meme diversity’ as a means to resolve the fundamental antagonisms inherent to capitalist relations of production. Isn’t the very idea of propagating a ‘plurality of memes’ in order to create a meta-narrative of abundance versus Capital’s ‘mindset’ of scarcity somewhat symptomatic of the post-modernist turn that Adam Katz described almost thirty years back? There’s no joy for me in raising such a question, in particular as I liked talking with Dávila – who happened to be one of my interviewees – and also have fond connections with colleagues who work with de Filippi. I don’t raise this question lightly or for the sadistic pleasure of calling out some under-performing colleagues or comrades; ‘performatively’ refuting the reality of scarce material resources, that humans must make do with and take care of, simply doesn’t seem a useful tenet. It doesn’t appear to me as conducive to overcoming the ‘tragedy’ that Andrei Platonov was paradoxically fortunate enough to not experience, and that has continued to bewitch much contemporary ‘leftist’ analysis, in the form of a wholesale negation of earlier forms of revolutionary praxis. The uncomfortable question that we have to ask, nonetheless, is how ‘events’ like Zuzalu – the two-month long ‘pop-up’ community and conference co-organised and funded by Vitalik Buterin in a coastal resort near Petrovac, Montenegro in 2023, at which Dávila and de Filippi spent many hours unpacking the concept of ‘Coordi-Nations’ – might objectively contribute to the necessary theoretical unterrifying task that I earlier referred to; moreover to the inevitable practical task of spreading enjoyable yet organised resistance among the as yet so splintered forces of the working class – in short, how they might create cracks through which light may pass.

Before I end with some further and firmer proposals, allow me to once again evoke the question of scarce material resources, with a singular vision that we were granted – a single tale of mutilated Gaza as a cultural form of relations of material production: amidst the rubble, donkey drawn carts replacing fuel powered vehicles, to transport scarce goods and take humans to the hospitals that still functioned back then – beasts that have probably by now been slaughtered and eaten. That same week of May 2023, I hired a donkey, led by my sons and daughter, my wife and I, just for the fun of walking in green pastures and along wooded lanes, for two days, holding a donkey. My sons fought to have the front seat of the car, when we returned to ‘civilisation’ after those days with the donkey. My younger son lost, and in a fit of rage, threw his smartphone on to the tarmac of the country lane, smashing the screen to smithereens. This was a week or so before the Milan fieldwork, where one interviewee gave us a 10pm appointment in a cocktail bar called Norah was drunk, located on a busy avenue. Their absinthe produced predictable effects; after the interview I glided out of the bar and on to the rainy Via Nicola Antonio Porpora, where a fast-paced passing fuel powered vehicle might have slaughtered me, had it not been for a reliable colleague suddenly yanking me backwards. Fieldwork is more fruitful when carried out in groups of two. I was accompanied for almost all of the forty-one interviews that I took part in, for this book (out of a total of 63 interviews). We were two in Montreal, New York, Milan and Switzerland, and even if it all had to be done on a shoe string – dining in the cheapest of Chinatown dives, getting by on cheese and bread in extravagant Zug, kipping in a corner of a kitchen in Montreal – making the most out the meagre funds we were granted in order to get out and meet these folks in the flesh is the way to do it. As Pierre Bourdieu suggested – although perhaps not always systematically practising what he preached: “knowledge of the conditions under which the product is produced is (…) essential to the rational communication of the results of social science” (Bourdieu, 1984 : 65). Fabien Granjon adds:

“The study of homo academicus communicans is far from popular – quite the opposite. There are obvious reasons for avoiding this reflexive work (...). Even when pursued methodically and rigorously, such labour (...) is bound to encounter countless obstacles rooted in the agonistic heuristic of this approach, which – if properly executed – inevitably exposes the power dynamics permeating academic practices, whose disciplines have a vested interest in controlling their public disclosure. As in other domains, the forms of domination imposed on individuals, even researchers, are anything but natural; they are constructed realities, consequences of social relations whose efficacy largely depends on the individuals subjected to them remaining unaware of what these relations truly are.” (Granjon, 2014: 287)

I won’t delve much deeper into this question of how we academic researchers in the painfully named fields of ‘information and communication sciences’, ‘media studies’, ‘Internet studies’ – or in broader swathes of social science – partake in struggles for scarce resources, other than to say that we cannot avoid confronting the question of the relations of material production which we are inscribed in, at different degrees and evidently, from different positions of very relative power, according to the status of the researcher. The tensions that characterise mediations between the products of our labour as researchers and the social forms of relations of material production may be illuminated by two strongly correlated observations. On the one hand, we must fully grasp the fact that the means of production we employ ultimately result from a process of socialisation and redistribution of a material surplus extracted within capitalist relations of production. On the other hand, it is worth recalling the socialist characteristics of one of the pillars of relations of production specific to tenured French enseignants-chercheurs (although admittedly those actually holding this status are well on their way to becoming a minority within the academic field given the countless loopholes and derogatory measures introduced over the past thirty years and encouraging replacement of tenured workers by precarious labour).

Sociologist Bernard Friot has emphasised the significance of the conquest of the State civil service (fonction publique d’Etat) status in 1946: within this system, devised under the leadership of communist Maurice Thorez, it’s the individual worker her or himself who is qualified, by virtue of the rank attained through national competition exams. By guaranteeing the absence of a labour ‘market’, an employer, and unemployment, this system explicitly prefigures a mode of production relations freed from capitalist exploitation. The lifelong position of the civil servant is guaranteed by her/his grade and which effectively abolishes subordination towards any hierarchical superior and establishes collective and egalitarian internal administration mechanisms. It goes without saying that the project of gradually expanding this system to the entirety of the active population was halted as soon as the PCF was evicted from government in May 1947, but this was the initial aim, contrary to the well-rehearsed diatribe that makes fonctionnaires a privileged minority. Whilst we’re on the subject of cracks whereby the light gets in, a second generally overlooked intervention in relations of production, devised in France at the same period, is worth mentioning. Contrary to the British National Health Service, the French social security system set up after the second world war wasn’t conceived as to be limited solely to the provision of health-related services, nor was it financed by taxation or managed by central government. Initially, it was funded by direct dues (cotisations) upon the revenues of capital and labour (before these were accounted for) and administered independently of political power by representatives of employers and workers, with a substantial majority of these last. For the instigators of this system, it was presumed that these dues would increase over time (as more human needs would be covered and more services and goods would be brought into the system and thus de-commodified), gradually eroding or rather replacing wages and dividends, until capitalist relations of production became a residual phenomenon. It’s interesting to reexamine, in this light, the debates and conflicts around the drafting of the Constitution of the 4th Republic, in 1945-46. The PCF was able, with significant segments of the socialist party, to impose the project of a fundamental law that guaranteed not only nationalisations without compensation for all monopolies, enforceable rights to social insurance and retirement pension, but also enshrined “security of employment” (Buton, 1993: 214). Moreover, in this constitutional project, the right of property lost its erstwhile absolute character (

However battered and residual their present forms, these two cases of socialist-inspired institutions that were actually erected, with the clear aim of surpassing existing capitalist organisation and domination of labour – and Friot’s project of re-actualising and extending them – testify to one particular path that can be forged in order to overthrow the tyranny of commodity and do away with the opposition between the different classes, the age old exclusion and oppression of the Other. It goes without saying that this is just one possible ‘blue-print’ for radical change, and that in its wake numerous contradictions will need resolving. If we remember with David Graeber how debt – as in recorded due labour, services and goods – emerges historically well before commodity form fixed in tokens, the question of how such recordings might quintessentially be tied to development of proto-capitalist and later capitalist material relations of production, remains salient in the case of inscriptions, on any shared ledger, of due labour and used goods or services – such as one would necessarily find applied in the event of mutualised ‘wage chests’ (caisses de salaire). This term refers to pools funded by social contributions, a percentage of revenues of labour and capital that would gradually increase, proportionately to the immaterial and material human uses afforded via these pools, without any monetary exchange for the user, until the ultimate point where the totality of labour and uses are thus included. Surely, the implementation of such a system would entail inscribing on a rudimentary ledger due labour and used goods (or services); this would remain a necessity for any foreseeable future beyond existing capitalist relations of production, but there is no reason to adjoin to this system anything resembling blockchain technology and certainly no form of tokens: the administration of the shared ledgers could be carried out by representatives of workers selected by lot for fixed terms, preventing the re-emergence of a specialised class of intellectual workers devoted to this task, with the same democratically codified rules and vigilance that would be required to ensure rotation of human participation across all manual and intellectual labour. Importantly, the democratic codification that I refer to here is that of the social forms of relations of material production, in such a way that it is impossible for any human to use even fleeting appropriation of resources to subordinate other living entities. Formulating what is at this point to some degree still, merely the dialectical emanation of a particular ideologisation process, nonetheless goes with a view to it aggregating with other cultural forms, and beginning to corrode and dissolve the general process of ideologisation that feeds into the pulse of major currents, and the barren landforms that they ineluctably spawn. What I want to offer here, take it in the shape of fugitive raindrops pattering over our parched soil, yet merging with other forces to nurture deeper, gradual changes. One last little warning, my meme dilettantes, my freakshow bros, my clumpety comrades, all tomorrow’s army and aftermath of the Thing-drunk: don’t count on the words – bodies move first.

¹: We might nonetheless recognise that by inflating value to a level of coverage of reality historically never before achieved, and by decoupling it from any objective link to real or even potentially available resources for humans, cryptocurrencies take a decisive step precisely in demonstrating the contingency of money.

²: https://www.franceinfo.fr/replay-radio/tout-public/les-banlieues-analysees-et-contees-par-luc-bronner-et-neuf-ecrivains-dont-mairam-guisse-et-rachid-laireche_7147521.html Accessed 23/07/2025.

³: This is a direct reference to the work of sociologist Alain Bihr, who theorised the development of a capitalist encadrement class in 1970s and 1980 France, consisting principally of intellectual labourers in the field of communications, media, education and social ‘animation’ – a decisive intermediary group between Capital and Labour. By extension, we may observe that entrepreneurs and the often highly ‘decentralised’ operators of digital intermediation platforms are objectively part of this class, whose core activity consists of intense ‘ideological’ production, directed both towards existing and would-be members of the group, and energetical contribution towards the extension of commodified relations of production, hence to the further deterioration of labour conditions for the working class, yet with plenty of ‘collateral damage’ among their peers.

⁴: Historian Evgeny Dobrenko reminds us that “Stalin and Platonov never met. But of all the writers with whom the Leader came into personal contact, or upon whose lives he exerted direct influence (…), Platonov was the only one whom Stalin properly understood – not in matters of personality (...), but politically and aesthetically.” (Dobrenko, 2011: 202). This observation sheds light on the anecdote of Stalin famously scribbling, in the margins of one of Platonov’s hence unpublished works, the words: “For future use” and this specific text was also deemed worthy of being kept aside, when it was written in 1934 and submitted to the authors of an anthology titled Two Five Year Plans. Indeed Maxim Gorky advised against publication, adding that the article should be kept “for the future”.