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Invoking the geomorphological study of evolving landforms may come as a slightly outlandish metaphor, yet it’s one that opens up several alluring leads. Solar energy is ultimately determinant for Earth surface processes, evaporating water and raising into the atmosphere the vapour which then condenses and falls as precipitation – meteoric water thus being transformed into kinetic energy. However, so short an extract omits the role of greenhouse gasses maintaining Earth’s temperature for evaporation and preventing rapid water loss to space, or that of nitrogen and oxygen, providing atmospheric mass, pressure which allows liquid water to exist. Fancy considering as distinct gases, the manifestly contradictory elements that Web3 cultural forms aggregate? Recall how small community ties, decentralisation and disruption, pragmatic technological solutionism, swimmingly cohabit with blatant individualism, capitalism-longevity and, above all, outright commodity fetichism. Just as our Web3 agitators’ mode of thinking precisely thrives on the juxtaposition of these seemingly contrary elements, let’s imagine that the conflicting tenets of academic debates might also constitute discrete gaseous forms. We may now further explore the hypothesis that those reputedly more ‘objective’ arguments of both scholarly analysis and investigative journalism, in numerous cases, similarly contribute – at several levels of mediation – to the erosion and transport of sediments which major currents effect.

Let’s begin with a few exerts from “Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit”, an article by British scholars Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows. It’s not exactly a canonical text but manages respectable citation metrics. More significantly, it claims to “offer a critical exploration of the activities of one particular fragment” of the post-neoliberal, or plainly libertarian, coalition, i.e. “bloggers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs and others who coalesce around neoreactionary (or NRx) philosophies” (Smith & Burrows, 2021: 144). Although there is evidently some informational value in this text, it also illustrates how much contemporary left-leaning academic writing remains on a descriptive and defensive level, unable to mount a substantial critique of / against the self-proclaimed ‘theorists’ of Web3 (although it should be reminded at this point that the ‘thinkers’ cited – Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, Peter Thiel, Patri Friedman do not constitute mandatory political references for the majority of blockchain players interviewed in my own fieldwork). It is unclear whether the authors’ ‘restraint’ stems from a form of self-censorship, from the journal’s editorial policy or from a lack of combativeness (in which case the causes should be examined more closely), but it appears to be part and parcel of their ‘approach’, even as they shelter behind Paul Gilroy’s authority, as if to avoid direct confrontation with so-called “fascist” theorists: “It is difficult to know how best to approach this material analytically. As Gilroy (...) suggests, when discussing fascist ideas ‘there is always a danger that critics end up taking them more seriously than their adherents do’.” (Ibid.: 145). For those who aren’t familiar with the ramblings of Curtis Yarvin, here’s a brief quote from the quaintly named pamphlet Patchwork, summing up his brazen ‘entrepreneurial’ political platform (which Smith and Burrows also refer to): “The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” (Yarvin, 2017). Although there is nothing really new about this proposal – Quinn Slobodian’s work Crack-up Capitalism (2023) illustrates how proponents of libertarian subversion have been keenly chipping away at crappily compliant governments and their Nation States since the 1990s – we’re arguably facing a somewhat refined text, ideologically speaking – pure capitalist advocacy bereft of any of the usual ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ bullshit. Smith and Burrows go on to explain how NRx argot qualifies academics as ‘cultural Marxists’, “a loose term which refers to virtually anything on the left of the political spectrum” (Smith & Burrows, op. cit.: 147-148) and how they depict a conspiratorial mouvance named the ‘Cathedral’ encompassing “not just the universities, but also the civil service, the media and any other organizations that foreground what Yarvin calls Universalism – egalitarianism, democracy, constructivism and so on”. They claim that this “reads like a crazily inverted version of the old Althusserian notion of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ (...) but rather than dampening down proletarian revolutionary dissent, in the NRx version the ideological function seems to do quite the opposite – to inculcate a false belief in the efficacy of democratic systems of government and the associated stymying of new forms of uncompensated capitalism” (Ibid.). This is an interesting and telling statement – as it is unlikely that Althusser would have shared the view that belief in the efficacy of democratic systems of government was a prerequisite for stirring up proletarian revolutionary dissent. What’s more, they declare that NRx discourse operates this type of “ironic inversions to naturalize social hierarchies and inequalities” and that “public figures such as Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump have both claimed to be ‘red-pilled’.” (Ibid.). We’ll come back to the pills later, but note how this paragraph is the only one in the article where the term equality appears. David Pucheu, by contrast, isolates this as an essential concept for any critical understanding of the ideological core of the notion of the ‘Cathedral’ and its reliance on so-called Austrian economics (a surprising no-show in this article claiming to trace the development of “neoreactionary philosophy”):

“This ideological framework inverts modern humanism: the goal is no longer to correct inequalities, but the egalitarian claim itself – branded as both pathological and ultimately ‘dysgenic’. As [Murray] Rothbard once asserted, ‘The egalitarian revolt against biological reality is merely a subset of a deeper rebellion: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the very organization of nature; against the universe as such’ (...) For anarcho-capitalists, [individual] liberty can only be grounded in the positive affirmation of differential human properties: sex, race, ethnicity, competence, IQ, capital... The ‘Standard Social Science Model’ (SSSM), as Land tersely labels it, is denounced as a constructivist dogma that erases biological and hereditary traits, reducing individuals to mere products of social and cultural determinism.” (Pucheu, 2025).

We’ll come back in due time to the root issue of that essential link between ideology and inequality; meanwhile note how Smith and Burrows’ conclusions lack critical force, entangled as they are in theoretically inconsistent and politically ambiguous proposals:

“Projects like Urbit¹, and other NRx exit strategies such as seasteading, offer vivid imaginary resources for those already possessing a predilection towards social withdrawal from the manifest crises and failures of contemporary global capitalism. (…) As we have already noted, the ease with which otherwise ‘batshit crazy’ ideas have become mainstreamed in recent years is perhaps a mark of the ‘new dark age’ in which we live. On any definition, we are dealing here with fascism (…) but at the same time we would be foolish to dismiss the memetic, almost infectious quality that NRx and [Nick Land’s] Dark Enlightenment possess”. (Smith & Burrows, op. cit.: 157-158).

Note that only three references are provided for “any definition of fascism” – but perhaps this is by the by; what seems to be entirely missing in this article is an analysis of why cultural forms which are likened to “batshit crazy ideas” are effectively functioning as resources for those who can be considered at least semi-conscious of “the manifest crises and failures of contemporary global capitalism”. In my view it is all the more lacking that the forms of labour those players engage in – producing and disseminating “infectious” and “memetic” texts, working within projects such as Urbit or related Web3 ventures – are erroneously perceived as a “social withdrawal” when they ought to be understood precisely as vigorous attempts to infuse and even deploy specific social forms of relations of production. Only towards the end of the article does one get a few hints to the political motivations of the authors themselves, as we can see from the following two extracts, both referring to the terms, and supposed effects, of libertarian ‘exit’ utopias:

“Exit apologist Balaji Srinivasan (...) sees the future as a techno-utopia because subjects can choose the ‘level of exit’ they desire: ‘there is this entire digital world up here which we can jack our brains into and we can opt out.’ The objective is to reduce the barriers of exit by fracturing the civil service and marketplace of progressive social theory through start-ups hyper-stimulated on billionaire finance.” (Ibid.: 159)

“We speculate that these fractures reinforce an emergent political order illustrated by projects such as Urbit and seasteading in order to provide material instances of exit architectures. (…) Discussions of exit touch upon key ethical debates facing Silicon Valley concerning the extent to which tech companies should participate in such matters.” (Ibid.: 158-159).

Their tame criticism rests upon the assumption that tech companies (including ventures pertaining to Web3) should not be involved in ‘ethical debates’ whose outcome might endanger the ‘democratic’ structures that afford the existing ‘civil service’ and its ‘marketplace of progressive social theory’. It’s remarkable that the authors (and their reviewers) didn’t see how plainly paradoxical this last notion is – lest we say that idealistically representing the academic field in this way borders on oxymoron – but the core flaw of this ‘conceptualisation’ is that it, in turn, rests on the pious hope – or the illusion (which amounts to the same thing) – that players spearheading regressions of relations of material production might prioritise ethics over the brute economic force central to their ideology. It is likely that such a confusion is tied to the absence of a political counter-project, a state of affairs one might correlate with conditions of production prevailing within the neoliberal university (or what’s left of it) – an evolution Adorno dismally predicted over fifty years back:

“People do science as long as something pays for it. But they have faith in neither its relevance nor the bindingness of its results. They would discard the whole consignment of junk, if changes in the social form of organization made redundant, for example, the ascertaining of statistical averages, in admiration of which formal democracy is mirrored as the mere superstition of the research bureaux. The procedure of the official social sciences is little more now than a parody of the businesses that keep such science afloat while really needing it only as an advertisement.” (Adorno, 1964 / 1993: 11).

Adorno is pointing to the superficial trappings of formally ‘democratic’ systems, that mask real inequality and domination rooted in the abstract logic of commodity. He’s condemning the role social science plays in legitimising these systems by producing data that offer an illusion of rationality and public consent. Admittedly, Smith and Burrows don’t appear to be great wielders of the statistical junk that Adorno scorns – yet one can’t help getting a whiff of the superstition he also derides, that faith in the ‘objectivity’ of institutionalised research to address such issues as “epistemological transformations invoked by artificial intelligence (...); the use of decentralized technologies, such as blockchain, for governance and self-determination (...); and, crucially, sovereignty” (Smith & Burrows, op. cit.: 144). Much contemporary left-leaning research on Web3 gives the overall impression of turning towards this formal democracy (or its relics) with a pleading air that isn’t even all that convincing, an odd sort of supplication blending with forewarning, as if to cry out to their institutional masters – minister, judge, parliamentarian, some other crony: “Please, for once listen to us, oh fine liberal one, before it is too late: our enemies abound, our proud tower is leaning so!” As previous examples have shown, some papers attempt to redeem Web3, or at least part of it – echoing in this respect the peculiar definition that Gavin Woods gave of it as “a larger sociopolitical movement that is moving away from arbitrary authorities into a much more rationally based liberal model”. This was in an interview given in 2021, but it reads as if it might belong to another century; he uncannily adds: “this is the only way I can see of safeguarding the liberal world, the life that we have come to enjoy over the last 70 years.” (Woods, 2021).

With their attempt to distinguish between “expansive and extractive networks of Web3”, Jathan Sadowski and Kaitlin Beegle are arguably of this second ‘school’. One might well wonder what possessed them, to use in their article’s closing paragraph such an awkward metaphor (all the more so since it suggests there’s likely nothing worth redeeming in the Internet of blockchains, which appears on the contrary to be one of the main purposes of the article): “if there are actually no insights or tools of value to be found in Web3, then at least we would have done the work of sifting for gold (or at least something useful)”. (Sadowski & Beegle, op. cit.: 12) – I highlight in italic. Notwithstanding, before they come to this conclusion (and also refute it), we’re provided with a meandering discussion of the potential distinctive traits of “the ‘decentralized finance’ (or, DeFi) arm of Web3 and the emerging ‘alternative’ Web3 project spaces” – or in other words the possibility of “a ‘culture war’ between anarcho-capitalists, who see blockchain as a way to free money and markets from the state, and ‘crypto-communists’, who see blockchain as a way to empower democratic autonomy and cybernetic planning” (Ibid.: 5-6) – here the authors refer to the musings of Ben Munster (2022) and a text by someone named B. Pimentel, which has subsequently vanished. This begins with a puzzling precautionary note: their analysis, we are told, must “account for the fact that the values and motives of individual Bitcoiners – or those drawn into other Web3 communities – cannot be summarized as a singular politics, even if the larger financial drivers and cultural narratives of these sociotechnical systems are overwhelming weighted toward certain positions and interests” (Sadowski & Beegle, op. cit.: 5). It doesn’t occur to them that the single largest “financial driver”, the aspiration to abstract equivalence of commodity exchange, appeals to (and encompasses) a variety of “positions and interests”; that it takes on the guise of a variety of seemingly “singular politics” and “cultural narratives” – which Sadowski and Beegle fail to explain precisely why we might take at face value. Blithely disregarding any such consideration, the authors pursue their categorisation, foisting upon us the following definition:

“Extractive networks, simply stated, are those which levy ‘decentralization’ as a primarily technical tool for creating, capturing, and circulating financial valuations. We use the term ‘valuations’ to mark that any ‘value’ here (e.g., the market cap of a crypto coin or price of an NFT) may not be tied, fully or partially, to the real economy (i.e., nonfinancial) or backed by liquid assets, but may just be representations of speculative capital. (…) We call this thrust of Web3 extractive because the overwhelming focus is on moving and amassing money; it’s innovation in decentralization as a strategy for capital accumulation and everyday financialization.” (Ibid.: 6)

The authors might give further consideration to the proposals of David Harvey of “fictitious capital” as “money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity [and] not backed by any firm collateral” (Ibid.: 8) – the authors are referring here to several exerts from Harvey’s Limits to Capital. However, for now, simply bear in mind that for Harvey, the expansion of ‘fictitious’ capital has been endemic over the past fifty years. Although this constitutes a shift from earlier predominant modes of accumulation, the recurrence and amplification of speculative bubbles isn’t a novel phenomenon; it is a ‘natural’ consequence of capitalism’s tendency to prioritise abstract accumulation over material reality. And this tendency itself is quite ‘real’; it is what the ‘economy’ really does. Claiming that this phenomenon – which the advent of cryptocurrencies prolongs and exacerbates – is ‘fake’, is a bit like magically wishing it away. It is believing that the value generated by this activity – numbers in a database, on a ledger, yes: representations of speculative capital – is somehow of an ontologically distinct order to that of the money we have invested in a life savings account, or of those euro coins jostling in your pocket. Seemingly not realising that Marx was demonstrating this profound logic of capitalism (in 1894, thus somewhat prior to the emergence of crypto), Sadowski and Beegle pursue: “As fictitious capital continuously moves through this financial system, circulating with increasingly more velocity and volume, its value appears to be ‘doubled and tripled’, Marx (...) writes in Capital Volume III, and is ‘transformed into a mere phantom of the mind.’ Or, to be even more baroque: all that is solid melts into phantasmagoria.” (Ibid.: 9). Indeed, and as they also creatively note: “Tinkerbell, like these technologies, only exists when we believe hard enough and clap loud enough” (Ibid.), failing however to comprehend that this is by no means a phenomenon arising from new ‘technologies’ but precisely from exchange abstraction. Hence the level of confusion that the authors reach in the following extract, where they seem to bow to the monopoly of legitimate violence of the State – its historical claim to defining fiction and dictating faith, be that by means of branding, beheading or mass enslavement:

“It’s ironic that fictitious capital has such a defining role in the development of Web3 considering that cryptocurrency boosters call regular money ‘fiat’ in an effort to emphasize that its value is just based on faith. The fictional decrying the faithful. Of course, this is not quite true since the value of ‘fiat’ money is actually backed by the power of state institutions.” (Ibid.).

I would suggest steering well clear of such idealistic graduations of the falsehoods of capitalism – lest one ends up with some romantic vision of the good old days of the ‘real economy’, with its quantifiable collateral of plantation cotton bushes and slaves, its six or seven year old piecers, scavengers and shuttle threaders toiling away fourteen hours a day on the Lancashire loom. Academic energy might be better spent in analysing both the more direct and broader material relations of production within which Web3 players are inscribed; i.e. starting with a set of basic questions that might include: what are their eyes gazing at and what are they sitting on? How were these professional grade monitors and ergonomic seats purchased, distributed, produced? What malnourished arms hauled all that tantalum to the surface, what hands soaked the taut mesh fabrics in vats of azo dye? How are our crypto bros making use of scarce material resources to play, to perform their specific form of intellectual labour, their own little kulturindustrie? Etc. These are finer questions than where the ‘real economy’ begins and ends, or rather: questions that can actually be answered.

Conversely, in Sadowski and Beegle’s account, ‘expansive’ networks are so designated “because of their progressive goals of plurality and inclusion – by which [they] mean multiplying the sociotechnical spaces, connections, and possibilities available to all people. In other words, it is a vision based on thinking critically about how decentralization via Web3 could contribute to creating ‘a world where many worlds may fit’, to quote the Zapatista slogan (...).” (Ibid.: 7). The two authors claim that ‘expansive’ networks promote authentic “financial inclusion”, unlike the ‘extractive’ ruse of using this term to prey on the “vulnerable or disadvantaged” (Ibid.); yet they face “longstanding difficulties of scaling robust social projects with equally robust decentralized tools [and receiving] vastly uneven investment and attention (...) compared to more extractive projects.” (Ibid.). Having skilfully set up the protagonists and scenery, our scholars may now side with the second group, who share a self-professed knack for, love of “thinking critically” (whereas the money-loving right-wingers use rhetoric to milk the meek).

In the conclusion of their article, the authors refer to the work of Evgeny Morozov, who suggests that, in comparison with Web 2.0, this new movement is deeply reliant on “performativity, with new realities being born out of the very language itself” (Ibid.: 11). They cite Morozov who claims that “the advocates of Web3 are quite explicit about this: we’ve got this beautiful map on our hands – all that’s missing is the territory it is supposed to refer to” and add ironically:

“This is the logic of solutionism taken to its natural endpoint. No longer is it enough to create (nonexistent) social problems to justify the application of technological solutions ready at hand. Now the focus is on creating (nonexistent) social worlds to justify the supremacy of technological systems being built in real time. Mapping the territory is a descriptive exercise. Territorializing the map is a normative project.” (Ibid.).

In their acknowledgement that “the primary force propelling Web3 is the momentum of capital” (Ibid.), and that Web3 might be understood as an attempt at effecting new social forms of relations of production – “territorialising” the ethereal map – we find the core insights of this article. But in that very same movement, its authors slide into something of a conceptual impasse: the notion of performing new realities out of very language itself is an old post-modernist trick – or, to put it more mildly, a classic culturalist confusion arising from the idealistic belief in the outright autonomy of cultural forms. That these last bear some degree of effectivity with regard social forms of relations of production is substantiated; yet disregarding the determinations of the economic form of these last prevents analysis of the ideologisation process, which operates ‘in both directions’. Several lines below, we encounter a clear sign of this conceptual disarray:

“As tempting as it might be, it would be too easy to condemn every element of the system and let Saint Peter sort out the good ones. The tough yet necessary task for normative analysis is to discern when to advance ruthless criticism and when to provide critical support for technological projects.” (Ibid.: 12).

Beyond the question of theological interpretations of divine judgment and Christ’s delegation of spiritual authority, the (metaphorical) implication here is that the social scientist should have the demanding duty to act as a steward who admits souls into heaven based on their faithfulness and deeds. Draped in the wording of “normative analysis”, these authors acknowledge the potential role they might play in the production of Web3 cultural forms, thus taking part in the “normative project” of “territorialising the map” of Web3 – an endeavour which, one can only imagine as following an ‘expansive’ logic aligned with the ‘values’ of inclusion, tolerance, and democracy!

Much of the “ruthless criticism” that these (and plenty other) authors reserve for Web3 players, projects and so-called ‘thinkers’ which they associate with the political right wing, borrows from the diagnosis and ideas of the late David Golumbia. His well-known thesis asserts that, as a technology, Bitcoin (and by extension blockchain) incarnates and activates far-right extremism, on three accounts. Firstly, as a supposedly decentralised currency² it epitomises a form of libertarian sedition and subversion against State run central banks and public regulation, which Golumbia associates with ‘democratic government’:

“These views entail that democratic government lies about the one thing that does in fact distinguish it from other forms of power – that it is directly accountable for its actions to the people from whom it draws its power – while simultaneously entailing that power derived from capital and markets is accountable to citizens. Worse still, it suggests that this market-based form of accountability does not merely trump the electoral and legal accountability built into representative government, but also shields corporate forces from the political critique to which the right routinely subjects government.” (Golumbia, op. cit.: 10)

Secondly, it derives from conspiracy theories which claim that powerful elites (often identified as central bankers, governments, or global financial institutions) deliberately abandoned the gold standard to manipulate economies, enslave populations through inflations and debt. Golumbia writes of “the projection of a shadowy, absolutely powerful, fundamentally evil racial or religious Other who is actually responsible for many major world historical events” (Ibid.: 24) Thirdly, it goes hand in hand with a “computationalist” mindset presuming “that computer-based expertise trumps that of all other forms of expertise” (Ibid.: 22), as for instance encountered in the writings of a Clay Shirky – whose 2008 essay Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations was a particular source of irritation for Golumbia:

“Premised largely on fantastical thinking, Shirky’s book touts the spontaneous birth of new ‘organizations’ from the internet – beyond the mainspring of traditional organizational forms – the bulk of which unquestionably work for the good of society. Shirky’s basic presumption is loud, proud, and untested: anti-institutional and frequently leaderless organizations, those that today we hear more commonly described as ‘horizontal’ or ‘decentralized’, are better for society than their more decrepit precursors. To the contrary, much of what democracies, civil societies, and even corporations (for-profit and nonprofit) work toward is embodied in institutions that are precisely what Shirky means by ‘organizations’: not just companies, but legislatures, courts, regulatory bodies, unions, the media, and much else of the foundational strata on which society rests.” (Golumbia, 2018).

I’m not going to question David Golumbia’s goodwill – his underlying belief in those institutions and “foundational strata on which society rests”; but that belief is the fatal flaw of his thesis, and what ultimately renders it somewhat ineffective – even against the inanities spewed by the likes of Clay Shirky or Mencius Moldbug. One might begin precisely with that last quotation: stating that society rests upon the foundational strata of these organisations is plainly stopping short of any historical and material analysis of the social formation. These more or less mealy institutions always rest upon material relations of production, not the other way round! Once again, such a blindspot places the analysis in a purely defensive position, lacking any basis for a viable alternative to the feeble institutional compromises inherited from liberal or social-democratic politics. Hence a single option remains open: misleadingly calling opponents ‘ideologues’ – in accord with most left-leaning critiques of blockchain, Tim May, Eric Hughes and the other cypherpunks become the proponents of dismantling “the very project of representative governance, at the bidding of nobody but technologists and in particular technologists who loathe the political apparatus others have developed”. (Golumbia, 2016: 33). Despite such a political homogeneity ever being found among Web3 players – whose diverse “cultural narratives” are recognised by most subsequent research, Golumbia makes the claim that “Bitcoin activates or executes right-wing extremism, putting into practice what had until recently been theory” (Ibid.: 22). He even stoops to chastising the outcast, the criminal: “the idea that Bitcoin protects civil liberties by encouraging those who are ‘not allowed to use the legacy banking system’ – a category that mostly includes people convicted of illegal activities – is one that only a deeply committed ideologue would make” (Ibid.: 59) – he’s admittedly reacting here to Pirate Party founder Ralph Falvinge’s credulous prattle about Bitcoin safeguarding civil liberties for the whole of the population. Such statements may offer solace to the hearts of anti-libertarians, but they also preclude examination of the more prevalent and ‘ignorant’ uses of blockchains and cryptocurrency, and all these have in common with the false and baffling handling of ‘fiat’ currency: exactly what allegiance to the superficial proclaimed politics of Christine Lagarde is required of me in my condition of a holder of euro-based life-insurance account? And when I flip Cendras a two euro coin in exchange for fifty centilitres of Atlas beer, do I forget that European integration is “an unprecedented experiment in political construction, aimed at pre-emptively countering the blows that social movements might strike against the capitalist order”

“It also used to be hard to imagine right-wing extremists like Cody Wilson being quoted as authoritative about anything in our nation’s leading newspapers. It is an index of Bitcoin’s power as ideology (and of the power of that ideology itself) that today such [gun-lobbyist] statements pass without much notice, and it is no less an index of the threat such technologies, and even more so, the ideologies they embody, pose to democracy itself. It is a threat the advocates of such technologies themselves frequently advertise, and it is this feature of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies that all non-rightist political thinkers need to take seriously.” (Golumbia, op. cit.: 66).

Thus, The Politics of Bitcoin ends, predictably, with a clear statement of wishful thinking, symptomatic of contemporary social science. Strangely, it’s again as if he really believed that clinging to Habermas’s essentialised public sphere might somehow save us from the playful riot of digital community backstabbings, reactionary NFT tribal wars or, more seriously, from the slow dull crushing of life-forms, the real maiming and slaughtering games which blockchain agitators, as yet, somewhat tentatively partake in: “What is required to combat that power is not more wars between algorithmic platforms and individuals who see themselves as above politics, but a reassertion of the political power that the blockchain is specifically constructed to dismantle.” (Ibid.: 76).

Consider, for instance, how this stance might possibly tackle the ‘contrarian’ tropes of Scorched Earth Policy, “Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation” – the meme-driven Web3 collective that that revels in weaponised irony to parody its own far-right dalliances:

“It cannot be understated that normies are not people, they are cattle. Their opinions do not matter, they aren’t real. Everything they believe is just parroting the slop that gets force fed to them from institutional astroturfing. Nobody actually likes Sabrina Carpenter. Nobody actually likes Taylor Swift. Nobody actually likes Spotify sponsored playlists and Top 40 radio tier slop. All of these basic bitch mocha frappuccino lifestyle surface level preferences are the result of taking the disposable livestock 80% of the population horde and placing them in front of a little box that tells them what to think every single week. (…) Sabrina Carpenter fans are not people. They are not even NPCs, they’re white noise. They are 2D holograms looping 5 second animations of standing up and cheering before sitting down again. They are vague 16 pixel blobs to be dispersed into a crowd of thousands, millions. (…) When you’re friends with a nonperson, they have to do calculus in their heads on whether to respond to your messages. When you sleep with a nonperson, it’s somehow more debasing than just masturbating. When you reproduce with a nonperson, you play roulette with God on whether your children have consciousness. When a nonperson dies, absolutely nothing changes in the world.”³

In France, over the past few years, one particular work of investigative journalism has pursued David Golumbia’s argument with some media success, judging by the number of the author’s appearances in debate and educational programs – No Crypto, by Nastasia Hadjadji (2023)⁴. A young Remilio collector might start his critique of Hadjadji’s pamphlet by stating that, from the very beginning of the book, she fails to see the difference between a centralised exchange (like good old FTX) and a decentralised distributed ledger network. He would rage against at a “horrendous statement” on page 136, where she seems to assert that validators fix or establish network fees – as this not only misguides users but it also gives a sense of centralisation, when cryptocurrencies are decentralised by definition! Our crypto bro wouldn’t care much either for Hadjadji’s comments about blockchains not being as fast as they claim to be, about the performance of the lightning network (a bitcoin layer for fast transactions): 800,000 transactions in a month against one billion transactions per day for credit cards. He’d say this is a terribly clumsy example because not only she fails to understand basic demand for a transaction to take place (no one pays for their groceries through lightning yet, so of course credit cards make more transactions) but she also doesn’t seem to understand the settlement process behind credit card transactions and how slow it actually is. Lastly, he would refute her complaints about the inexistent security net surrounding decentralised transactions (no chances of cancelling a transaction going to the wrong address). Ouch: our blockchain enthusiast would say that this just shows how lazy she was in her research, to ignore the different layers of safety already available for decentralised transactions and methods such as account abstraction granting safety in exchange for a share of decentralisation.

Setting aside these somewhat technical quibbles, a more fundamental point of contention lies in the first chapter’s critique of “the cult of Bitcoin” – our crypto bro would object: “she spends a whole chapter (justifiably) criticising Bitcoin maxis through a biblical interpretative framework but doesn’t seem to know that everyone in the industry treats them as clowns”. I might not be quite so thoroughly on the defensive, but her prose certainly deserves some critical commentary. “Should we be concerned about this syncretism between technology and religion?” (Ibid.: 36), she asks, after having spent the previous twenty pages precisely puffing up this daunting account of the Bitcoin cult (including a mandatory reference to identity politics bogeyman and hero Kanye West), and concludes that “the most vulnerable populations (…) are becoming the targets of a predatory economy that works like a casino”, producing “new generations of online gamblers” (this last citation she borrows from a Financial Times podcast). It’s tempting to play devil’s advocate by pointing out that the flourishing of privatised national lotteries, online sports betting platforms, financial trading applications, etc. are arguably just as serious, if not worse offenders – or indeed that her obsession with the cultish apparel of Bitcoin maximalists obscures the deeper roots of a noxious belief system. Nastasia Hadjadji appears to appreciate David Gerard’s greater fool theory, which pertains to the belief that the value of shares and stocks are related to the wealth created by companies, their capital, their assets, and that the value of ‘fiat’ money is linked to the wealth of a country or an economic zone, its influence beyond. She claims that unlike these last, cryptocurrencies are inherently based on a negative sum game requiring ongoing influx of capital from defrauded newbies, and that “the only value created by crypto-assets is exchange value” (Ibid.: 87). Similarly, stablecoins are seen to “possess no objective value, unlike the dollar bill” (Ibid.: 121). These have the appearance of bold statements, but one might well ask precisely what are these cultural forms attempt to effectively uphold? Furthermore, Hadjadji dislikes crypto-colonialism, but she endorses the idea of “tools such as cash, pre-paid credit cards or Western Union transfers” as “simple, safe and fast solutions for all vulnerable populations” (Ibid.: 137), while wishfully conjuring up “robust public redistribution policies in the field of finance, housing, access to education and health” (Ibid.: 137-138). She claims that crypto’s main purpose is to avoid “the arbitrary that rules over life in a community, by evading in particular the taxes and fiscal contributions (sic) that enable the State to fulfil its redistributive function.” (

Assertions such as crypto-assets constituting “fake currencies” and “real fetishes” (Ibid.: 161), or the claim that DAOs “serve to financialise the principle of deliberation by means of digital tokens that are subject to all forms of manipulation” (Ibid.: 153) all offer the same partial chastising that simultaneously undermines her critique of “the deceptive promises that only serve to keep new investors trapped in the collective illusion that increased financialisation of the world can more effectively subvert power structures than a grassroots challenge to financialised capitalism itself” (Ibid.: 159)⁵. Pushing David Golumbia’s theory of the politics of Bitcoin, she condemns crypto advocates for the funding of the January 2021 assault on the Capitol and, drawing from Cameron and Barbrook’s well known study, writes of an ideologically homogenous group assembled around the “explicit political project aimed at replacing the State with code by entrusting the reins of collective decision-making to private technology companies, so as to mark the end of the ‘parasitic Leviathan’ that the State represents.” (Ibid.: 155). When this question was raised, systematically, in our research interviews, even the few self-professed libertarian party supporters offered more nuanced and ‘pragmatic’ responses, such as the ones we find in the following statements, first from the founder of a Web3 machine learning platform, second from the co-founder of a Web3 development company:

“I see it not so much anti-systemic or anti banks, but a new infrastructure that is going to replace the current existing infrastructure and or like an evolution of it. Yeah, I think that banks or the state is going to still be there. This is how I see it, but it’s going to evolve into something that is more open and trustless in terms of infrastructure because, probably people are going to think this kind of right for privacy or, or transparency.” (i53)

“I’m going to give an example. So I built a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. (…) Basically a system where people see the proposals and the proposals get altered if the vote passes, you implement something, you know, so you could use this in associations, foundations, and bring more transparency to these institutions on how you manage money, how you manage your assets, how you do things. So I think this technology can be integrated with the current... with the status quo. Maybe a DAO will replace some form of company type, like in the future. It could, but not yet. (…) I don’t want to kind of simply shut down governments or, disrupt, you know… I think, as I said, adapting is better.” (i50)

It is interesting to consider how, in the last chapter of her work, Nastasia Hadjadji refers to T. W. Adorno:

“As early as the 1930s, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno emphasised the crucial role of affects in the constitution of populism. In this respect, the online communities that bring together lovers of crypto-assets are fertile laboratories for understanding the birth and spread of a new type of populism infused with blockchain and cryptos. These Telegram loops, Reddit forums and Twitter spaces are often sounding boards for the expression of disenchantment and the rawest financial nihilism.” (Ibid.: 158).

To the best of my knowledge, Adorno did not specifically use the term “populism” and what Nastasia Hadjadji writes applies more broadly to vast swathes of online audience labour and its intense production of cultural texts, offensively stretching far beyond the realm of blockchain and cryptos – although as we have seen, one of Web3’s central features is admittedly its reliance on the digital intermediation platforms owned and valorised by communicative capital (Nixon, 2014). She pursues: “As it grows increasingly difficult to decipher the causal chain leading to socioeconomic decline, people turn to simplistic explanations.” (Hadjadji, op. cit.: 159). Might I playfully propose that this ‘explanation’ itself bears the hallmark of simplification – apparent also in the way she lumps Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins into the same Harvard dorm room and, more tellingly, reduces the brothers’ entire fortune to their NFT investments⁶? On a more serious note, it is present when she claims: “Bringing about ‘left-wing’ crypto projects means rethinking the ideological foundations on which most existing systems are based today (...) This sector is characterised by an extreme concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a cyber-few.” (Ibid.: 165). I would retort that the “ideological foundations” aren’t to be confused with political posturing, which is what already existing or imaginary ‘left-wing’ crypto projects do (just as keenly as their ‘right-wing’ counterparts). Web3 can be seen as an extension, an intensification of the dominant trends and contradictions at play in contemporary capitalism, a derailment of sorts, from an ‘ideological’ perspective. This derailment – the accelerationist turn, one might be tempted to call it, for the while – is not sensed by all players, even within the Web3 field; it is ignored by many, whose naivety or lack of consciousness may well indeed pass for what Hadjadji choses to call “raw nihilism”; it is vaguely sensed by some – who are aware that a sort of mysterious magic is operating with their own moves on the board; theoretically, it remains to be convincingly conceptualised. Rounding up blockchain players and pointing the finger at them indiscriminately as the nihilistic slayers of an equally essentialised social-democratic State isn’t exactly moving things forward – or perhaps it is, but paradoxically in the very same direction that major ‘ideological’ currents effect.

Other authors appear, at first glance, to be more audacious in that regard – notably those mobilising the somewhat over-used notion of ‘commons’ in their research on blockchain-based ‘alternatives’, specific on-line communities and projects, or pertaining to the potential development of novel legal/institutional frameworks. Joshua Dávila aka the blockchain socialist takes a step in this direction, in his book Blockchain Radicals, although his work rests upon a questionable doctrinal premise, flatly ruling out the possibility of revolutionary take-over of the State and its regulatory apparatus:

“(…) if we are going to try to live with the contradictions inherent to building the new in the shell of the old, funding during this awkward stage will certainly not come from the state-regulated banking sector. Only by creating bonds of solidarity and networks of mutual aid for cultivating dual power will we reach true economic democracy and freedom, and doing that will likely include engaging with some parts of shadow banking in a strategic fashion.” (Dávila, op. cit.: 154).

His core proposal for a blockchain-based revolutionary praxis – the “potential to move away from platforms to using protocols on blockchains allows for new economic models that don’t rely on the alienating dynamics of the attention and creator economy” (Ibid.: 176) – operates around an equally debatable historical analogy: “autonomous zones of post-capitalism can spring up and stay resilient, like the villages of artisans and tradesmen that challenged entrenched noble powers when feudalism was the dominant mode of production in Europe” (Ibid.: 155). As illustrations he suggests systems that use algorithms or peer evaluations to distribute rewards within open-source communities and cooperative frameworks; tools like SourceCred and Coordinape are mentioned as mechanisms to assess and allocate value to intellectual labour contributions. Admittedly, his focus is on providing a “map of the crypto territory to help you and the social movement you may be a part of to navigate it safely” (Ibid.: 28) but there are clear limitations to this project of charting “new connections that are not made in mainstream discourse as it exists at the time of writing” in order to “lead us into new futures” (Ibid.), and the limitations of the author’s project – should we say, his modesty – transpires in somewhat muddled or misleading formulae such as:

“The left cannot be using an incorrect map, or a conceptual model, to derive a response. The left must also be cognizant that whatever model or mapping is created will be wrong or limited to some extent. The point is to try to make one which is at least useful. The book therefore asks readers to not ask what crypto represents, but instead ask, ‘What can crypto do?’, without too much concern for the current map of the territory they may have in their head.” (Ibid.)

Another author who appears to busy herself with similar ‘progressively minded’ cartographic endeavours is the law scholar Primavera De Filippi, co-author of Blockchain and the Law (De Filippi & Wright, 2018), considered a foundational book on how blockchain disrupts traditional legal frameworks. De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society of Harvard University. She co-founded the COALA (Coalition of Automated Legal Applications), a global initiative on blockchain governance whose activity appears to have waned somewhat over the past few years, yet which notably advised EU policymakers on blockchain regulation, co-organising a series of workshops with the European Commission in 2016-2018. She has developed the ‘concept’ of “network sovereignties” proposing that decentralised, blockchain-enabled systems facilitate novel forms of self-governance and collective autonomy, undermining conventional State-centric sovereignty through distributed, code-driven social and economic structures. She also co-authored a chapter of a book purporting to “probe the deep roots of our current predicament while reflecting on the social DNA for a post-capitalist future”. In their contribution, “Blockchain Technology: Toward a Decentralized Governance of Digital Platforms?”, Primavera De Filippi and Xavier Lavayssière thus discuss the emergence of commons-based initiatives, relying on alternative legal frameworks and new participatory models to promote openness and distributed collaboration:

“Commons-based innovation is concerned with maximizing the utility of software applications and online platforms built and operated by the community and for the community. Rather than trying to undercut the monopoly rents collected by dominant market players, these initiatives leverage the power of digital technologies to promote peer-to-peer collaboration through the creation of platforms and tools designed to further the needs of specific communities and the public at large. As opposed to most of the market-driven initiatives described above, this new form of innovation – sometimes described as commons-based peer-production – operates according to a more open and co-operative approach, which is grounded on the principles of free and open source software.” (De Filippi & Lavayssière, 2020: 192-193).

They argue that blockchain technology “provides new avenues for traditional market players, startups and commons-based initiatives to access new forms of capital and to engage in a variety of profit-making activities” (Ibid.: 201) and that “by rewarding people with cryptocurrency and other blockchain-based tokens, commons-based initiatives have the opportunity to scale up and attract a larger pool of contributors – especially those who are not ideologically aligned with the underlying mission or objectives of the project, or who are not sufficiently satisfied with existing non-economic returns.” (Ibid.: 209). Lastly, we find a number of normative proposals, such as the following:

“(…) because they already come with their own governance system, existing commons-based communities could transpose part of their current community rules and social norms into a set of code-based rules, incorporated directly into the underlying code of a blockchain-based applications. In doing so, they could shift some of their off-chain governance into a system of on-chain governance that is more transparent and no longer requires any third-party or centralized enforcement – because these rules are automatically enforced by the underlying technical infrastructure.” (Ibid.: 218).

Initiatives such as www.commonsstack.org claim to be offering such seemingly post-capitalist (or ‘non-extractive’) applications, “empowering communities through self-governance”:

“The institution of the commons provides a proven way to manage shared resources and promote participatory governance. It is based on a shared community ethos, and its design incorporates bottom-up participation, transparency, autonomy, and individual accountability. By embodying these qualities, the commons succeeds in its mission to catalyze the regeneration of its shared resource but also to maintain a healthy community that is collectively committed to that regeneration and actively participating in it. The commons design moves us one step further away from extractive capitalist models and one step closer to planetary health.”⁷

Such a rambling profession of faith is echoed by one other prominent scholar’s utopian take on blockchain futures – Igor Calzada’s “Decentralized Web3 Reshaping Internet Governance: Towards the Emergence of New Forms of Nation-Statehood?”. In this article he playfully sets his own “new nation-statehood paradigm” (Calzada, 2024: 1) up against Srinivasan’s “network states” and De Filippi’s “network sovereignties”. His own gadget is dubbed “algorithmic nations”. Srinavasan predicatbly gets to play the villain of “market-driven governance and the financialization of social relationships” (Ibid.: 11), while the other two are a flurry of smiley jargon: “autonomous spaces”, “meaningful engagement with local communities and ecosystems”, “responsible innovation”, “empower communities”, “locally tailored, respecting specific community needs”, “shared values rather than financial transactions”, “trust, cooperation, and sustainability”, “future-oriented narratives”, “deep commitment”, “democratic and inclusive decision-making process”, “ethical governance practices that minimize negative externalities”, “health and prosperity of the collective”, “culturally rooted self-determination”, “social justice, environmental sustainability, and digital rights”, “equitable and transparent decision-making and deliberation”, “governance reflecting their values and traditions”, “community well-being, resilience, and cultural preservation”. Feeling giddy? Indeed, that’s quite a conflation of froth and wishful thinking: “This model gradually transforms nation-states into decentralized, digitally empowered entities, where sovereignty is shared across different governance levels” (Ibid.: 20), he assures us – and rejoice, for “the debates surrounding Network States, Network Sovereignties, and Algorithmic Nations are not just theoretical; they have real-world implications for how we organize society and exercise power in the digital age.” (Ibid.). Supposedly employing an Arendtian perspective (although he doesn’t care to quote a single line from her great contributions to political philosophy), he concludes at least and at last somewhat realistically, that his cherished “decentralized Web3 ideology offers a provocative vision of new forms of nation-statehood futures, yet it is one that warrants critical scrutiny given that it might be a map in search of territory” (Ibid.: 22). One can only wonder at the resources gobbled up in search of that territory, during a grand tour which appears to have taken him from the University of the Basque Country to the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data, and on to the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, with stopovers at London-based US-UK Fulbright Commission and in the charming Bavarian lakeside resort of Dießen an Ammersee, where he took part in the SOAM Network Sovereignties Residence Programme, “a space to break silos, build new bridges and form unlikely alliances (…) situated in a vast garden, [offering] private access to the lake and a beautiful view of the bordering Alps.”

In his work Intellectual and Manual Labour, Alfred Sohn-Rethel writes of the need to seize upon “necessary false consciousness” as subject-matter for materialistic critique, “in order to penetrate into the foundations of this world and to learn how it holds together and how it could be changed effectively” (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 196-197). He elaborates on this argument:

“Necessary false consciousness is false, not as a fault of consciousness, but by fault of the historical order of social existence causing it to be false. The remedy is in a change of this order, a change which would remove powerful and deep-rooted characteristics upon which that causation can be proved to rest. Marx lays great stress upon the fact that his critical disclosure of the fetish character of the value concept by no means does away with the spell of this concept which commodity production must exercise as long as it is allowed to remain in being. Man, in the social sense, is not wrong; he is deceived. He is innocent of his necessary false consciousness, and no amount of cruelty and slaughter ensuing from it among men can impair the eligibility of mankind for fighting its way through to a classless society. (…) Necessary false consciousness has its roots, not in the class struggle, but in those conditions of historical necessity out of which class antagonism itself results. This might give rise to distinguishing necessary false consciousness from ideology understood in a narrow sense as accessory to class struggle. (…) Hitherto in history social existence has always been such as to necessitate false consciousness. Fulfilment of the ideal of timebound truth would be through the creation of a kind of social order allowing for correct consciousness. Such a social order could, by factual implication, only be a classless one. It would still imply continuous change and not, as by the inconsistency of Hegel’s idealism, imply changelessness. The historical potentiality of such an order and the way of its political realisation are explored by accounting for the necessary false consciousness in present and past history.” (Ibid.: 197-200).

I’ll leave open, at this juncture, the slightly pernickety question of how to distinguish between cultural forms that fixate necessary false consciousness and the more directly operative ‘ideological’ productions (including those of anti-capitalist activists). What can at least be put forward is that necessary false consciousness imbues the supposedly ‘objective’ arguments of scholarly analysis and investigative journalism, contributing therefore more or less effectively – more of less ‘ideologically’ – to major currents upholding, entrenching, existing material relations of production, or even intensifying these last. Moreover, as implied by Sohn-Rethel’s conclusions, such an observation shouldn’t be mistaken for an accusation of ‘fault’ in the existing scholarly attempts at critically analysing Web3. Yet what is idiotically decried as ‘cultural Marxism’ by the so-called red pillers actually seems quite incapable of producing any viable critique – marred as it is in a vacuous celebration of ‘democratic politics’ at best, or in an all out capitulation to the forces of identity and grievance politics, the contemporary descendants in this of the anti-communist crusade of the New Left (Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2023a: 11-62). This essentially constitutes a political ‘stance’ which has proved incapable of mounting any effective form of class struggle; it ends up clinging to the cardboard cut-out of a leader Joseph Robinette Biden, while really worshipping commodity, force and exclusion just like the red-pilling opponents – although these last are so necessarily falsely conscious that they don’t even bother to cover it up with the frothy dribble about human rights and democracy, bent on demonising the blue pillers’ assault on ‘freedom’. Yes, it’s about time the heads of blue and red pillers were banged together – if only to shake up the erudites and all their lazy literature, all their crude usage of the concept of ‘ideology’, that stinking assumption that our ‘liberal democracies’ are the best thing since sliced bread or, as their erstwhile hero spouted out, that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. Yes damn right, you know those lines! But you’re perhaps less familiar with his assessment of placing Boer women, children, and elderly – as well as Black African labourers – in concentration camps, where overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate food led to disease outbreaks and claimed the lives of fifty-odd thousand humans: “I believe that as compared with other wars, this war in South Africa has been on the whole carried on with unusual humanity and generosity.”⁹ Nor will you probably recognise this other memorable contribution to democratic politics: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.”

I am watching the ground below from above Founding all of the shapes we know Oceans and planes are Oceans and planes are Landforms are forming The oceans and planes I see the old ones dying away Other Lives, “Landforms”, 2011

¹: Urbit is a decentralised personal computing platform founded by Curtis Yarvin, designed to be a secure, user-owned alternative to the traditional internet, combining an operating system, a blockchain-based identity system, and a peer-to-peer network.

²: Golumbia doesn’t grant the status of money to Bitcoin or other cryptos, a specific point that I’ll come back to in the third part of this book.

³: https://x.com/scearpo/status/1916940772806693252?s=46 Accessed 03/07/2025.

⁴: Hadjadji, N., op. cit. Following the publication of her book, she has made numerous media appearances, including on France Culture’s Les Enjeux internationaux, BFM Business, and France Inter, as well as in the pages of Libération and Le Monde. She has also contributed to independent interview platform and YouTube channel Thinkerview and expanded her critique of cryptocurrencies at various academic conferences.

⁵: Note both the odd formulation here: “its basis” and the qualification of “financialised”. Might their be a good, non-financialised capitalism, like that other chimera we encountered earlier, the “real economy”?

⁶: Their father, Howard, founded Winklevoss Consultants, Inc. in 1981, incidentally the same year the twins were born and his influential book Pension Mathematics with Numerical Illustrations was published. His work on defined-benefit plans was influential in corporate retirement structuring and he advised the U.S. government on ‘Social Security solvency’ in the 1980s.

⁷: https://www.commonsstack.org/about accessed 01/07/2025.

⁸: https://soam.earth/residency/, accessed 02/07/2025. Although it is unclear what SOAM stands for, it appears to be the brainchild of Felix Beer, an LSE Economy, Risk and Society alum whose linkedin presentation says that he “supports clients from politics, business and society in co-creating transition processes through a mission-oriented multi-stakeholder approach”, and that “his toolbox includes transdisciplinary research, governance studies, policy design, strategic foresight, systems thinking, innovation ecosystem design, qualitative and quantitative methods, co-creation and participation, systemic facilitation and design thinking.” Giddy again?

⁹: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/his-maiden-speech/ Accessed 02/07/2025.

¹⁰: https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-137/churchill-proceedings-churchill-and-bombing-policy/ Accessed 02/07/2025.