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‘Mind, he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower – ‘Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…’

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899

Do not mistake me, the land they come to is not all milk and honey. Nor was the way of the frontiersman, or the frontier woman, or the frontier child. Nor were these all cast in heroic or congenial, or even tolerable, molds. But the new order in the Southern countryside, the new order in the Northern city, offers an economic foothold, as did the old clearing. It calls on the spirit of team play, as did the old settlement with its road building and its barn raisings. There is a smack of opportunity and freedom in the air. The very process as bound up in those changes in individual fortune, is instinct with that group consciousness of common adventure, is fresh with the tang of growth and expansion, which the wagon trains carried with them to the West, and which became the theme of our pioneering.

Paul U. Kellogg, “The Negro Pioneers”, in Alain LeRoy Locke, The New Negro, 1925

In a curious and knowing article, Isabelle Simpson and Mimi Sheller ponder how “islands have long been imagined as ‘laboratories of nature’ and as ‘hosting paradises’ both for natural sciences and for technological and business experiments (...), as well as for more dystopian experiments such as the island slave-plantation, the quarantine of arriving immigrants, or the isolation of political prisoners” (Simpson & Sheller, 2022: 5). They reference prior research showing how cryptography has been employed “to extract currency (creating a parallel economy not subject to taxation or auditing) and sovereignty (creating parallel governance mechanisms and regulations)” and, moreover, “to colonize subjectivity” (Ibid.: 7) – concluding that, as with the early globalisation of transatlantic slave trade and its “plantation economy”, “these small islands again serve as the fulcrum for the future disposition of crypto-capitalism” (Ibid.: 8). These proposals aptly introduce this third section of the book, which probes deeper into the Web3 cultural form, and what can be grasped as both its primal source and its end product: subjectivity-colonising value, precisely! This theoretical inquiry might well be understood as piecing together further fragments for an ontology of the token – what does it mean, and how does it interpellate us, historically and materially? Bear with me as this will entail setting sail, taking off and back in time towards those small islands that Simpson and Sheller refer to, and shipping out for a while with the contemporary ‘pioneers’ of Web3. Let’s contrive to be their secret stowaways – as they gleefully attempt to cut loose and leave it all behind, until they find themselves stranded in the horse latitudes

When the still sea conspires an armor And her sullen and aborted Currents breed tiny monsters True sailing is dead. (Morrison, 2021: 25)

Fancy being puzzled by all the nautical undercurrents. Well, listen how that same naive voice of an earlier movement of flight beckons us to

Come for all the world lies hushed & fallen green ships dangle on the surface of Ocean, & sky-birds glide smugly among the planes (Ibid.: 377)

– and pause now to recollect the hallucinatory escape that Web3 ideologisation enacts. Recall how our blockchain agitators lurch out into a virtual realm, disconnected from any of the old material bindings; that unprecedented leap into abstraction which they take, with its promise of access to an unbounded ethereal dimension, a whole universe to carve up – in sum: taking on a new wilderness.

Thus, we shall return to earlier occurrences of that notion and its counterpart, that urge to push back the Frontier – “that group consciousness (sic) of common adventure (…), the tang of growth and expansion, which the wagon trains carried with them to the West”, as Paul U. Kellogg uncannily proclaimed. We shall reexamine the ideological and material foundations of the New World: the cult of commodity and ‘growth’ draped in providential licence and guidance, on the one hand; genocide and appropriation of formerly common land, proto-industrial plantation slavery, on the other – a sweet-tooth mired in bloodshed and swindle, or what historian Sylvie Laurent refers to as “the establishment of a new hierarchy of humans and nature”:

“The colonial regime established by the Spanish and Portuguese, which imposed the already familiar extractivist logic – built on monoculture and slavery – was thus not only capitalist, but essential to the extraordinary metamorphosis that capitalism would trigger in Europe in the following centuries. Without the profound reconfiguration of the world that followed 1492, Europe could never have shed its ‘still marginal position’ within the world-system and imposed its hegemony. The dismantling of preexisting social relations and the establishment of a new hierarchy of humans and nature also required an operational organisation of human groups: Europeans on one side, and peoples dispossessed of their lands and bodies on the other.” (Laurent, 2025: 51).

Admittedly, Laurent’s core thesis lies in the notion that “far from coincidence, contingency or historical accident, race and capital” are inextricably fused as of 1492 and that the “colonisation, enslavement and exploitation of the Americas was less the ‘dawn’ of capitalism – as Marx wrote – than its matrix” (Ibid.: 10). There’s little point getting tied up, at this point, in a debate about dawns and matrixes, as we’ve seen how significantly more historical distance is required to grasp the gradual emergence of capitalism as the dominant social form of material relations of production. But before we fully embark on this final sequence of the book, take stock of the following account, that a Swiss Web3 entrepreneur gave us of his thoughts, orbiting around that very same question of capitalistic innovation, as he slithers from the Dutch East India Company (1602) and slavery-based expansion, to the contemporary prospect of intensified commodification of all reality:

“In 2016 there was also an exhibition here in the National Museum. What they showed was the first share. It was this document from the Dutch East India’s Company. It was the first document that said you have a fractional ownership of a company. And before that, it was the king that decided who gets money and who doesn’t. Then after that paper, when you had it, actually, you became a shareholder in a company, the entrepreneurs could say: ‘No, you know what, we see differently: we pull money together and we take the risk. We can venture and do it by ourselves.’ It was a way of decentralising the risks and the rewards. And Web3, in my view, is the same thing just on a product level. (...) So instead of being a co-owner of, of this smartphone company, you could become a co-owner of this series, this product line. So you have a more sophisticated financial product. And the more transactions you have, usually in an economic cycle, the richer the economy becomes.” (i51)