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These theoretical stepping stones allow us to grasp the profound consequences that historically situated evolutions in material relations of production have had upon human consciousness, in particular the invention and spread of a tangible representation of abstractness in the form of coins – and moreover the representation of identity that they enact by practically ‘ensuring’ that X amount of coins is equal to X measures of flour, X limbs of a slaughtered animal, or X days of labour. The incarnation, within commodity abstraction, of the principle of identity is of course a key point raised throughout Adorno’s philosophical work, as we find with this key proposal: “The first objective abstraction takes place, not so much in scientific thought, as in the universal development of the exchange system itself” (Adorno, 1969: 148). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno had famously posited the centrality of the concept of commodity fetishism as the ideological core that contaminates each and every specific cultural product of kulturindustrie – these thus becoming models “of the gigantic economic machinery, which, from the first, keeps everyone on their toes, both at work and in the leisure time which resembles it” (Adorno & Horkheimer, op. cit.: 100). As abundantly illustrated by Frederic Jameson in the first part of his Late Marxism (1990), Adorno and Horkheimer’s masterpiece (and much of Adorno’s subsequent work) decries the consequences for thought systems which, henceforth equated the concept with the object, refuting the non-identical qualities of all incarnations of the natural world. If only human mental abstraction allows for identity (thus for commodity / exchange abstraction and the material relations of production it entails), it is easier to understand how the power or effectivity of Web3 discourse might be derived from the relative ‘purity’ of its texts; I mean by this their crudity as straightforward enunciations of the primacy of the economic form, and of commodity / exchange abstraction (although this is not to suggest that this is all that they obviously enunciate).

These basic theoretical elements provide firm safeguards against the limits and pitfalls of prevalent conceptions of ‘value’ and of ‘ideology’ as articulated in existing analyses of Web3 discourse and usages of blockchain technology, including the studies that have – albeit fleetingly – addressed the political economy of ‘blockchain-enabled’ intermediation platforms. With these elements laid out, I will pursue the argument that Web3 cultural forms or texts possess a characteristic – to avoid the word quality – that endows them with a particular relevance for contemporary ideological critique. This relevance is condensed, at a primary level, in the ‘transactional’ and ‘adversarial’ attributes of blockchain technology: its very design effects limitless expansion of commodity exchange, within networks operating under the inherent assumption that no participant is to be trusted. Pause to consider the crudity of the following announcement, made by the co-founder of a Web3 music distribution platform: “Every time you mint a song from an artist, the artists will get the majority of that money and we will take something like a dollar fee for every mint.” (i28) Isn’t there something deeply familiar about this neat one dollar fee, as soothing as a Dollarama or a Poundland shopfront, or that sort of yodelling that you get from fruit and vegetable merchants at a French street market, shouting out to punters: “Un euro, un euro, un euro”? Another entrepreneur tapping into the same market provided an equally elementary utterance of commodity fetichism:

“I think the whole concept of ownership might change. It’s not ‘I own it 100%’, but you maybe own it 0.0001%. (…) When we drop a new song on our platform, they offer 25% and we have hundreds of people that want to go there. You’ll have a user that for forty days comes back again, and he just buys a tiny little bit more, because he wants to come to 0.0001% (…) to round it up for him, yes.” (i51)

Thirdly, observe how this CEO of a crypto asset management platform describes the technology behind Web3: it is indeed perceived as portentous insofar as it appears to resolve the (seemingly spellbinding) riddle of the non-rival nature of digital commodities:

”Blockchain in general in my opinion is the first time since the introduction of computers that we can have transfers in a digital manner. I have gold in my hand and I give you the gold means I don’t have it anymore and you have it. This is not possible otherwise. Sending an email means both parties have the email, sending a photo both parties have the photo; the transfer of a digital item is not possible and that I think is the power of it.” (i59)

These fragments of discourse epitomise how designers of these dispositifs actually experiment them (and, of course, attempt to propagate them) as novel and powerful vectors of value’s age-old drive. Yet, precisely as fragments, they offer only a partial and fleeting grip for critique. To come closer to modelling how Web3 cultural forms – as a potentially coherent ensemble – effectively operate mediations towards and from material relations of production (in sum, the ideologisation process they afford), we must probe further in two seemingly divergent directions. First we need to consider a point that Sohn-Rethel’s historical account of the emergence of exchange / commodity abstraction overlooks; second, we must take into account specific forms that Web3 platforms and applications encompass and ‘infrastructurally’ rely on (for the sake of a now fashionable academic term), i.e. the computer code that makes any blockchain based service work in the first place.

In Debt: the first 5000 years, David Graeber (2014) challenges Adam Smith’s classic account that money evolved from barter – which is also the basis that Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work implicitly recognises. Instead, Graeber argues that societies originally relied on systems of credit and debt long before the invention of coinage or markets. People kept track of what they owed each other in social relationships ‘transcribed’ on to what effectively were primitive forms of ledgers (not through impersonal transactions). This notion of the primacy of debt is interestingly also advanced by Robert Kurz in his work Geld Ohne Wert (an ultimate attempt to transform the critique of political economy, given that he died that same year). Kurz bases his theoretical account of the emergence of money on the work of philologist Bernhard Laum, who claims that quantification of material goods does not stem from a secular “logic of exchange” but solely from sacrificial cults in relation to the divine (Kurz, 2012: 94), thus seeking to establish the “derivation of money and exchange relations from sacrificial structures and the ritual object-world of religious constitutions”. (Ibid: 98) At its core lays the quasi-axiomatic need to appease the gods in an uncertain world. Sacrifices to the divine generated a form of valuation – where Laum apparently finds the etymology of the term gelt (Ibid: 95), denoting a ritual offering wholly distinct from economic/exchange logic as initially, this meant human sacrifice. In Indo-European traditions, cattle emerged as the primary sacrificial gift to secure divine favour (Ibid: 96). Oxen functioned not as proto-currency between humans, but as sacred tender in transactions with the divine. Even precious metals and coins retained this sacral character. Laum maps their evolution: from substitutes for human sacrifice (“history’s most elemental ‘money’”) to animal offerings, then to ritual implements like spits (drachme, obolos), which formalised hierarchical obligations within sacred exchange. Later hybrids included vegetal effigies, stamped sacrificial cakes (possible precursors to the Christian host), and eventually metal discs bearing animal, deity, and, at last, ruler portraits (Ibid: 97). All this is rather entertaining, but it ultimately requires one ‘little’ clarification: that the instilling in human consciousness of the primacy of sacrifice, and debt towards a divine power, developed in tandem with the historical emergence of specific relations of material production – particularly between ‘indebted’ humans and those tasked with representing or mediating access to the divine (or as Sohn-Rethel explains, between manual labour and intellectual labour). In somewhat schematic terms, these intermediaries – entrusted with accounting and managing the material distribution of goods – simultaneously developed, from the earliest human civilisations onward, the dual function of quantifying and of legitimising the appropriation of commodities (both resources and labour power) by privileged groups. This appropriation enabled, crucially, the institutionalised power to inflict death upon those challenging their privileges. Indeed, echoing Horkheimer and Adorno’s well-known thesis, Kurz writes that “capital fetishism represents not merely a ‘progress’ beyond religious constitutions, but simultaneously a

David Graeber’s work establishes that rather than emerging ‘naturally’, markets were often created and sustained through state violence. Coined money became widespread as states, particularly military powers, minted coins, paying soldiers, and then demanding taxes in that currency, effectively forcing populations into market-based economies to obtain the needed money. In his airport easy-reading essay Money: a Story of Humanity, David McWilliams shuttles us back to Ancient Mesopotamia, claiming: “Early money was grain-based; grain gave money a universal value. In Sumer (...), for instance, one shekel was equivalent to a bushel of barley. The shekel could be counted and traded easily.” (McWilliams, 2023: 21) In actual fact, it was not traded at all. Although the banker vulgarisateur quotes Graeber, here’s what the anthropologist actually writes:

“The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel’s weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley – on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It’s easy to see that ‘money’ in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. (…) It would have been easy enough to standardize the ingots [of silver], stamp them, create some authoritative system to guarantee their purity. The technology existed. Yet no one saw any particular need to do so. One reason was that while debts were calculated in silver, they did not have to be paid in silver – in fact, they could be paid in more or less anything one had around.” (Graeber, 2014: 39)

McWilliams’ essay predictably propagates the myth of monetary abstraction, value exchange driving the development of society: “Grain-based money propelled humankind from a world determined by the natural technology of fire towards one driven by a human technology, money.” (McWilliams, op. cit.: 22) Doing so, he again ignores Graeber’s analysis, partly based on rediscovery of the work of economist and monetary theorist Alfred Mitchell-Innes:

“We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency.” (Graeber, op. cit: 40)

Mitchell-Innes indeed refutes the hypothesis of a standard (fixed) value being attributed by authority to coins, in Ancient Greece:

“The earliest known coins of the western world are those of ancient Greece, the oldest of which, belonging to the settlements on the coast of Asia Minor, date from the sixth or seventh centuries B.C. Some are of gold, some of silver, others are of bronze, while the oldest of all are of an alloy of the gold and silver, known as electrum. So numerous are the variations in size and weight of these coins that hardly any two are alike, and none bear any indication of value. (…) All writers are agreed that the bronze coins of ancient Greece are tokens, the value of which does not depend on their weight. All that is definitely known is that, while the various Greek States used the same money denominations, stater, drachma, etc., the value of these units differed greatly in different States, and their relative value was not constant (...). There is, in fact, no historical evidence in ancient Greece on which a theory of a metallic standard can be based. The ancient coins of Rome, unlike these of Greece, had their distinctive marks of value, and the most striking thing about them is the extreme irregularity of their weight. (…) There can be no doubt that all the coins were tokens and that the weight or composition was not regarded as a matter of importance. What was important was the name or distinguishing mark of the issuer, which is never absent. I have made this rapid survey of early coinages to show that from the beginning of the rise of the art of coining metal, there is no evidence of a metallic standard of value, but later history, especially that of France up to the Revolution, demonstrates with such singular clearness the fact that no such standard ever existed, that it may be said without exaggeration that no scientific theory has ever been put forward which was more completely lacking in foundation.” (Mitchell-Innes, 1913)

Mitchell-Innes uses the term ‘token’ to describe a rotten or poor form of money, yet another mention of the word completes this, inviting further reflection. Here is what he writes about a method of punishment that Carolingian authorities applied to persons refusing to accept their coins:

“The coin which had been refused was heated red-hot and pressed onto the forehead of the culprit, ‘the veins being uninjured so that the man shall not perish, but shall show his punishment to those who see him’. There can be no profit from minting coins of their full value in metal, but rather a loss, and it is impossible to think that such disagreeable punishments would have been necessary to force the public to accept such coins, so that it is practically certain that they must have been below their face value and therefore were tokens, just as were those of earlier days.” (Ibid.)

In his bedtime essay Money: the True Story of a Made-up Thing, Jacob Goldstein comically recalls how Marco Polo was met with sheer disbelief when he returned to Europe with accounts of the usage of paper money in 13th century B.C. China: “His story about paper passing as money seemed so absurd to people in Europe that they thought he was making it up. (...) He saw in China a radical monetary experiment that appeared in the world for a moment, then disappeared and wouldn’t return anywhere on Earth for hundreds of years.” (Goldstein, 2020: 10) He further expands:

“Around 995 AD, a merchant in Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, had an idea. He started letting people leave their iron coins with him. In exchange for coins, he would give people fancy, standardized paper receipts. (…) “Pretty soon, rather than go to the trouble of getting their coins every time they wanted to make a purchase, people started using the coat-check receipts to buy stuff: the paper itself turned into money. (The merchant didn’t invent this out of thin air. Provincial governments had previously given traders paper receipts in exchange for bronze coins, but traders typically just used those receipts to avoid taking coins on long journeys; those receipts never really took off as money.) (…) After a few years, the government took over the business of printing paper money. (…) For people who couldn’t read, most bills had a handy picture of the number of coins they could be exchanged for. There was usually some kind of landscape or streetscape. The bills were printed in multiple colors – text in black, landscape in blue, official seal in red. Almost always, a big chunk of the bill was taken up by a warning like this one, from a bill printed around 1100 AD: ‘By imperial decree: criminals who counterfeit [this bill] are to be punished by beheading. The reward [for informers] shall be 1,000 guan.’ (…)” (Ibid.: 11)

In a similarly humorous tone, Goldstein refers to a key characteristic of Andean civilisations which illustrates the contingency of coins (or paper notes) as an incarnation of value, but also shows how the question of their presence, or absence, as a means of allocating resources is inherently tied to that of control and domination by an authoritarian minority in charge of intellectual labour:

“In the Americas, thousands of years after the Mesopotamians, the Incas would create a giant, complex civilization without any money at all. The divine emperor (and the government bureaucrats who worked for him) told people what to grow, what to hunt, and what to make. Then the government took what they produced and redistributed it. Incan accountants kept detailed ledgers in the form of precisely knotted strings that recorded vast amounts of information. The Incas had rivers full of gold and mountains full of silver, and they used gold and silver for art and for worship. But they never invented money because it was a fiction they had no use for.” (Ibid.: 8).

Tokens, coins, or notes – call them what you like – function as a means of attribution or allocation of value affording power, domination of specific social groups, paving the way for the establishment of class-based oppression and exploitation. Mitchell-Innes’s refutation of the classic theory of standard, fixed value of coins challenges the notion of a smooth, universal system of commercial transactions based on single currencies. Nevertheless it doesn’t refute Sohn-Rethel’s argument of the emergence of a specific type of commodity designed purely for abstract exchange, contiguous to the separation of intellectual and manual labour. In fact, it completes this argument with the observation that abstract belief in the emergent coin was tied, from the word go (and before that, inchoately), to value as both measure and discrimination, an instrument of inherent exclusion and domination. Exchange abstraction mediated by money works ‘more efficiently’ than costly slaughter and mutilation – even if it would take centuries, advancing slowly through countless episodes of human branding, execution and enslavement – to substitute sheer physical violence in relations of material production for the widespread (albeit universal) adoption of commodity exchange. Elementary forms of exchange abstraction were clearly nascent in systems of quantification and exchange that predated the advent of coinage. The Mesopotamian proto-ledger prefigures commodity form in the sense that property of either natural or transformed objects, and equivalence in labour time, are ‘accounted for’. Admittedly, debt and credit based systems, where people track obligations over time, imply more flexible and real material relations between living beings than the subsequent bewitching entrapment by commodity in the shape of tokens (or other forms of money) and ultimately abstract human labour – both indeed extending from physical violence and redoubling its coercive drive¹. This is what Robert Kurz also explicates when he writes that “while money is always already practically presupposed under capitalism, this doesn’t negate that logically speaking, money itself has value as its presupposition in order to become universal in the first place.” (Kurz, op. cit.: 52)²

This material and historical sequence is wholly misunderstood by most acclaimed scholars of blockchain and cryptocurrency; for instance Quinn DuPont absurdly reverses its causality when referring to the three “claims” that Nigel Dodd (2016) attributes to money: debt, trust, and political authority:

“Debt is widely believed to be the oldest or original form of money (...), and from debt, trust and authority emerge. Debt requires higher levels of trust due to the risk of default, which must be prevented by the threat of violence, which is justified by political authority.” (DuPont, op. cit.: 74)

DuPont goes on to surmise that at present, “societies delegate actions and values to these new timestamping and record-keeping devices” – referring of course to blockchains – and that in this regard, “cryptocurrencies make a claim of authority” despite lacking “formal backing from sovereign nations and financial institutions”, because “authority is delegated from people to technology.”(Ibid.) According to the self-professed quant, “the specific way each cryptocurrency is programmed constitutes its unique ‘plot’ [and] the cryptocurrency designer creates a plot through shared cultural assumptions about technology and society” (Ibid.: 74)³. As we’ve seen, Web3 players generate a plethora of cultural texts, taking the form of recognisable image and writing – the candles and curves of price charts, the protean slang, the mathematical formulae of primitives, original algorithms and vast continents of code in numerous languages. Quintessentially its most refined representations of value come in the form of seemingly ‘living’ numerals, ever shifting, everlasting crypto. The computer code they are based upon is a type of cultural production that can enact other cultural forms on screen: a program, a website or a video game, or specific parts of any of these. It can also afford ‘real life’ generation or performance of cultural forms, and indeed many blockchain-based applications aim to encompass swathes of vital human/non-human activity. One obvious example is implementation of this technology in food supply-chains, Possible alternatives for: One obvious example is implementation of this technology in food supply-chains, as is enthusiastically noted by Adekunle Stephen Toromade and co-authors of a recent article in the Finance & Accounting Research Journal:

“One of the primary benefits of blockchain technology in the food supply chain industry is its ability to ensure the authenticity and integrity of data related to food products. By recording every transaction and movement of food items on the blockchain, stakeholders can verify the accuracy and provenance of the information. This transparency reduces the risk of fraud, counterfeit products, and food safety incidents as any discrepancies or anomalies can be quickly identified and addressed. Moreover, blockchain technology enhances the traceability of food products, allowing the stakeholders to track the journey of products from the farm to the consumer. (…) For example, Walmart, one of the world's largest retailers, has partnered with IBM to implement blockchain technology in its supply chain. By using blockchain, Walmart can track the movement of fresh produce from farm to store in real-time, enabling faster and more efficient recalls in the event of food safety issues (...). Another example is the collaboration between Maersk, the world's largest shipping company, and IBM to develop a blockchain-based platform for tracking global trade transactions. Known as TradeLens, the platform uses blockchain technology to digitize and automate the documentation process, reducing paperwork, delays, and errors associated with traditional paper-based systems (...). In addition to these large-scale initiatives, numerous startups and small businesses are leveraging blockchain technology to improve transparency, traceability, and accountability in the food supply chain. For example, companies like Provenance and VeChain use blockchain to verify the authenticity and sustainability of food products, providing consumers with access to detailed information about the product's journey from farm to table (…). (Toromade et al., 2024, 1250-1251)

However little the punter knows about the picking of the thiamethoxam and chlorothalonil infused cantaloupe melon by a Moroccan Fremdarbeiter, it’s more than she can fathom the code that got it to the yodelling market heckler’s stall. In blockchain-based applications, code determines database framework, the structuring of specific distributed ledgers, rules for adding new blocks, for forking, etc. In this regard, it may play a fundamental role in effecting social forms of relations of production, and – atop of the general predatory and dominative trends of these last – thoroughly sets apart those who are able to manipulate these languages from other humans, who can understand and practice only the ‘secondary’ forms that are tangible via screens/interface (and in their real life ‘extensions’). In essence, this was the discovery that appears to have amazed one of our interviewees, a software developer who recalls stumbling upon an unexpected find in the early 2010s, before fully converting to crypto himself:

“I was originally a software engineer right out of college in 2001. In 2011 (...) I was doing analysis of hashing algorithms. (…) It turns out, hashing is very useful in Bitcoin. So someone was saying: ‘Oh, so this is when miners are mining bitcoin, really what they’re doing is running lots and lots of hash functions.’ (…) This is around 2011 and someone had told me about this: ‘Oh that’s interesting, you’re making money out of hash functions. I never would have thought about that’!”

Blockchain coding isn’t merely quantification of the existing material reality. Like other forms of computer coding, it simultaneously complexifies, adds to this reality, and reduces it (and the ever-expanding dimensions of digital life) to the quantifiable commodities of crypto-assets. It is thus not so much a case of any authority being delegated from people to technology than the authority of exchange value – the power of commodity abstraction – being ever more forcefully imposed on people (and other life-forms) via technology, and the designers and practitioners of that technology. In a somewhat naive way this process is precisely what Jathan Sadowski and Kaitlin Beegle are referring to when they write that “for the majority of people, it is fair to say that Web3 can seem impenetrable, as if it were difficult to comprehend by design [yet] this does not make the values and technologies any less concrete in their existence or effect.” (Sadowski & Beegle, op. cit.: 2-3). Indeed, what they are recognising here is the effectivity of Web3 as a coherent cultural form of material relations of production, in its myriad manifestations beginning with (and departing from) computer code.

It will be clear by now that by ‘coherent’ I am not implying that there exists any formal or logical validity to Web3 discourse – even less that it might ever offer some form of dialectical resolution of contradictions; simply, it constitutes a relatively consistent, historically determined instance of ideologisation. Like other contemporary or earlier meta discourses, such as those of the ‘information society’, ‘participatory culture’ or the ‘sharing / gig economy’, it applies the classic combination of denial (what Adorno refers to as the veil, der Schleier) and reinforcement of existing structures of domination. It reeks of kulturindustrie’s compounding falsehood – “The flight from the everyday world, promised by the culture industry in all its branches, is much like the abduction of the daughter in the American cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark” (Adorno & Horkheimer, op. cit.: 113). Yet, there is something more to Web3, something that lies in the exacerbation of contradictions that it achieves – not just as we saw, in part one, with regard to those wholly antagonistic strands of promissory text, but on a more basic level. From the elementary assemblage of computer code all the way up to glittery white papers and elaborate ‘finfluencer’ videos, these texts are intrinsically bound up with the generation of value; commodity-abstraction infuses them through and through. I would argue that they are more purely ideological than any other existing cultural forms: rather than constituting misleading froth above those well controlled economic binds which – as Eric Hazan reminded us – Xenophon recommended for masters to be able to devote themselves to politics, these alleged computational or political or educational / entertainment texts are themselves entirely devoted to exchange abstraction, marked by an underlying oath to crypto. Simultaneously, they make one further fundamentally ideological claim: the generation and accrual of value is henceforth manifestly uncoupled from labour. In this regard, they enact a hallucinatory flight from the capitalist mode of production while performing a thunderous, orchestral consecration of its core principle; this unprecedented leap into abstraction calls for a critical modelling which, as yet, is wholly lacking in the field of social science. Considerable academic labour is spent in indulgent research that merely describes the so-called ‘values’ of blockchain actors and either celebrates or decries such and such superficial aspects of what these studies name ‘ideologies’ – often without undertaking any serious analysis of either of those two concepts. However troubling this may therefore seem to many scholars and students, I reiterate that these concepts should be mobilised with far more care – on grounds exposed in some detail above, in both cases, but also for somewhat more down-to-earth reasons. Indeed, I cannot abide that each and every superficial, vague political opinion or judgement is named an ideology – in particular those that the author is more or less blatantly opposed to. And while it strikes me that ‘use-value’ is a somewhat superfluous category – an object meeting a need or a purpose assigned to it simply has a use; why bother to bring the notion of worth into it?! – the meanings ascribed to this term by sociologists and linguists seem quite as contaminated by ‘the economic’ as those of the word ‘contract’ did to David Graeber:

“To imagine society as a contract is to imagine it in distinctly market terms. Given the tremendous power of economistic ideologies in the world today, relentlessly hammered in on everyone in a thousand different ways, words like ‘contract’ have become pretty obviously unsalvageable – there is no way to use them without assumptions about isolated individuals (usually assumed to be males about forty years old) coming to a rational agreement based on self-interested calculation.” (Graeber, 2001: 230)

In an article published in the Socio-Economic Review Kobe De Keere, Martin Trans and Stefania Milan state that for crypto players, “future value must be imagined, otherwise economic investment is not only stagnant but simply pointless” (De Keere et al., 2025: 3) and that in order to apprehend “the cultural nature of economic value” we should follow Jens Beckert in observing “how fictional expectations through imaginaries produce market engagement.” (Ibid.: 4) Beckert neatly challenges the neoclassical economic assumption that prices are determined by production costs or other ‘objective factors’, while demonstrating how the “intersubjective nature of preference formation contradicts methodological individualism” (Bronk & Beckert, 2022: 17). Attempting to conceptualise the “intersubjectively assessed worth of goods” (De Keere et al., op. cit.: 2), such authors systematically overlook Adorno’s contribution to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology:

In general, the objectivity of empirical social research is an objectivity of the methods, not of what is investigated. (…) The empirical methods (…) have ignored societal objectivity, the embodiment of all the conditions, institutions and forces within which human beings act, or at most, they have taken them into account as accidentals. (…) No matter how positivistic the modes of procedure, they are implicitly based upon the notion (…) that the embodiment of the contents of man’s consciousness or unconsciousness which form a statistical universe possesses an immediate key role for the societal process. Despite their objectification, in fact on account of it, the methods do not penetrate the objectification of the object, or in particular, the constraint of economic objectivity. (Adorno et al., 1977 / 1969: 71-72)

Is it not patent that a notion such as the “cultural nature of economic value” is nothing more than a disguised way of stating the ideological force of value, its ability to pervade and pervert human thought? In their conclusion, De Keere, Trans and Milan suggest that there are “intrinsic tensions” between those who wish to reduce price volatility and those who use it for speculation, between those who “[imagine] a value for crypto outside its original ecosystem by proposing and hoping for mass adoption” and those who are “not so committed to the core values of infrastructural mutualism”. (De Keere et al., op. cit.: 23). They add: “these tensions, however, do not necessarily undermine the viability of the market. Instead, dissonances in valuation are often economically productive” (Ibid.) – which indeed wraps it up, rendering their intricate demonstration somewhat pointless other than as “photographing of brute existence” (Adorno & Horkheimer, op. cit.: 118). This article ends with the predictable dose of wishful thinking: “What initially might start out as a simple investment for short term gain can eventually, like a trojan horse, turn into full long term political engagement. As we know, technologies, and crypto is certainly an important example, have a performative effect and can transform people’s beliefs and behaviors.” (De Keere et al., op. cit

Critical analysis of the particular ideologisation processes that Web3 effectuates is obstructed, to a certain extent, by tenacious theoretical confusions and idealistic preconceptions. To inch closer to this aim, further analysis of some key elements of existing literature is required. Not only is it worthwhile to clarify certain ambiguities found among the most influential authors who have worked on the Internet of blockchains and cryptocurrencies (particularly within the small handful of investigative or analytical works that have gained some traction in mainstream media); it is also important to recognize that journalistic and academic writings themselves contribute to mediating relations of material production, as cultural forms – a fact that is often conveniently ignored or obscured. It is therefore useful to bear this in mind, to take stock of how these particular texts may also hold a certain effectivity with regard to broader social structures – be that at a micro level (for instance in the relations between members of collectives associated with ‘action research’ projects), a meso level (i.e. authors, research groups and institutions bolstering specific cultural forms of relations of production – such as the decentralisation mantra – among individuals taking part in the Web3 ‘ecosystem’ in the elusive quality of ‘entrepreneurs’, owners of means of production or financial investors, and labourers), or at a macro level, with regard to actual variances among and between more general aspects of material relations of production (organisation and division of labour, ownership and control of means of production, modes of exchange and distribution, class struggle, etc.). Consolidating existing social forms of these last, modifying them or indeed structuring derivatives – ephemeral or potentially more durable – is to some extent the retroactive result of competing ideologisation processes, which aggregate cultural forms, some feeding into the pulse of major currents, reinforcing endogenous processes of the capitalist system; others in the shape of fugitive rains sweeping parched soil, yet lending force to deeper, gradual changes.

Geomorphology literally means the study of the Earth’s landforms. (…) Geomorphologists investigate landforms and land-scapes addressing multiple aspects, such as their genesis, morphometry, chronology and past and future evolution. They also investigate Earth surface processes not only to understand their morphogenetic role, but also to gain a scientific basis for assessing and managing a great deal of environmental problems associated with them, notably geohazards (e.g. landslides, floods, subsidence, earthquakes). (…) Landscapes are the result of the competing effects of endogenous processes, like tectonic activity and volcanism that create topography, and exogenous processes that tend to erode upland regions and accumulate sediments in lowlands and subsiding areas. The distribution and configuration of the large morphostructural units of the planet are largely governed by plate tectonics (megageomorphology). A small fraction of the energy involved in the horizontal translation of the lithospheric plates is converted into the work necessary to uplift rocks against gravity. Solar energy is the main engine for Earth surface processes. It evaporates water and raises moist air in the atmosphere. The vapour condenses at high elevation and falls as precipitation. The potential energy of the meteoric water is transformed into kinetic energy and expended by doing geomorphic work, including erosion and transport of sediments. Surface processes, controlled by a number of extrinsic and intrinsic factors, may create and modify landforms. Some changes in the landforms are related to processes or stimuli that exceed a critical threshold (e.g. landslide triggered by earthquake shaking). Those adjustments may be immediate or can be achieved over a certain period, called the response time (e.g. isostatic rebound related to deglaciation). The magnitude and frequency patterns of morphogenetic processes are highly variable (gradualism versus catastrophism). Some processes produce continuous gradual changes (e.g. dissolution in a phreatic conduit), others occur sporadically and catastrophically (e.g. volcanic explosive activity) and others have a mixed behavior, with long low-intensity periods punctuated by discrete extreme events (e.g. the flow in a river). The resulting landforms have highly variable persistence times. Some geomorphic features are ephemeral (e.g. small sand dunes), whereas others have a high preservation potential (e.g. glacial cirques).

Landforms of the Earth, Francisco Gutiérrez, Mateo Gutierrez, 2016

¹: It is notable how one of our interviewees reflected upon the power that his platform aims to harness by blurting out, in reference to the French economist Jacques Rueff: “It’s a little bit like the creation of the European Union. I think there was a French politician that said: ‘L’Europe se fera par la monnaie ou ne se fera pas’. Monetary incentives are very powerful to change behavior.” (i51)

²: This point is admittedly made within the context of a critique of the Neue Marx-Lektüre’s ‘monetary value theory’. Kurz defends the validity of a ‘pre-monetary theory’ “consistent with the unity of the logical and historical posited since Engels, insofar as Marx’s logical sequence of categories (deriving money from the commodity’s value-form) is simultaneously read as a historical sequence”, as demonstrated by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, cited here: “For Marx, the commodity precedes money both conceptually and historically” in Kurz, R., Ibid., p. 46.

³: DuPont is basing his argument here on the work of Mark Coeckelbergh and Wessel Reijers.