The politics of bitcoin software as right wing extremism review

Thus, Bitcoin is a kind of Trojan Horse, and cyberlibertarians who would not accept the claims of broader political libertarianism are at best duped to be the agents of the destruction of society. Inflation has become a tool to overcome the psychology of never allowing prices to fall. For example, we are told of an article Dyson, et al. E-gold was soon gone, while Goldmoney — under the stewardship of James Turk and his brother, operated with an even handed, rigorous governance structure. Durham, NC: Duke. The gains from each individual transaction or exchange may be quite small, but the aggregate consequences can be enormous.

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Aing by Mark Jeftovic righht Guerilla-Capitalism. It is not only those who see themselves as libertarians who, through the adoption of Bitcoin and the political communities around it, routinely distribute political and economic views that are grounded in conspiratorial, far-right accounts of the Federal Reserve and the nature of representative government…. It is no surprise then, with Central Banks and governments unable to control the uptake of cryptocurrency and further decentralization, a new set of existential threats is being advanced. These can lead to oppression and violence against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority, or their perceived threat winng the nation, state or ultraconservative traditional social institutions. The book was published in and appears to be an expansion of an earlier paper published in A colleague of mine made me aware of it before the holidays.

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To browse Academia. Skip to main content. You’re using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. David Golumbia. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange.

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To browse Academia. Skip to main content. You’re using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. David Golumbia. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange.

This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Contents 1. An Overview of Bitcoin 4. Central Banking Conspiracy Theories 5. Software as Political Program 6.

In just under a year investors who timed their buying and selling correctly could have made around 8, percent in profits, far exceeding the performance of most, perhaps politcis all, traditional investments.

This remarkable performance thrust Bitcoin into the public eye, eventually attracting numerous start-up projects, venture capitalists, and investors. By far the majority of interest in Bitcoin came from technologists and those who follow and admire the work of technologists. Dogma propagated almost exclusively by far-right groups like the Liberty League, the John Birch Society, the militia movement, zs the Tea Party, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke, and to a lesser extent rightist outlets like the Fox media group and some right-wing politicians, was now being repeated by many who seemed not to know the origin of the ideas, or the functions of those ideas in contemporary politics.

These ideas are not simply heterodox or contrarian: they are pieces of a softwware worldview that has been deliberately developed and promulgated by right-wing ideologues. To anyone aware of the history of right-wing thought in the United States and Europe, they are shockingly familiar: that central banking such as that practiced by the U. The first of these is the phenomenon that scholars call cyberlibertarianism.

The central texts describing cyberlibertarianism are Barbrook and Cameron and Rigth ; for more recent accounts see Turner as well as Golumbia b, c, in preparation.

There is no time to pause, reflect or ask for more influence in shaping these developments. In the writings of cyberlibertarians those riyht to rise to the challenge are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust. Someone who fits this description would likely have cyberlibertarian beliefs, of course and a few pundits associated with the Koch brothers—funded Mercatus Center do explicitly embrace the label; see Thierer and Szoka But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right.

Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. Instead, and at least sometimes without explicitly knowing it, they accept definitions of certain fundamental terms that come from the political right, especially when digital technologies are at issue.

But that is definitely not where the writers carry their reasoning. Yet in most non-rightist political theory, government exists in no small part to promote human freedom. Cyberlibertarian doctrine did not develop in a vacuum. It fits into, and at best does nothing to resist, the profound rightward drift evident in so much of contemporary politics. This becomes clear when we examine the explicit political and economic doctrine and practice that is usually called libertarianism in the United States here meaning the political movement that is explicitly advocated by right-wing partisan institutions such as the Cato Institute, the Heartland Foundation, the Mises Institute, and others, as well righ astroturf movements like the Tea Party and political figures like Ron Paul and Rand Paul and its connections with the less explicit doctrine analysts call neoliberalism.

Both of these doctrines or dogmas stem from the writings of core right-wing thinkers such as Friedrich August von Rihgt, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Rothbard, and others, as well as their more recent followers. The most trenchant critic of this work, on whose research my analysis relies in particular, is the economic historian and theorist Philip Mirowski, whose Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste remains the single most comprehensive account of what he calls the Neoliberal Thought Collective and the nearly identical Mont Pelerin Society MPSof which Hayek was the founding president.

Mirowski, along with some of his colleagues, has explained with particular cogency how Hayek and others disseminated neoliberal doctrine. The journalist Mark Ames explains how apparently disparate political interests, especially in the context of Silicon Valley, can be seen to work. In this way, much right-wing discourse, even when it appears to be focused on issues that are not purely economic, turns out to work extremely well for the most concentrated sources of capital and power in our world.

Power is one of the central subjects for political analysis, and perhaps the central subject: who has power, who wants power, what the perspectives those who have and want power are on the creation and maintenance of methods for the management of power. We might say that right-wing politics sides emotionally and practically with power—it identifies with power, and via this identification works to ensure that nobody extremisk with the concentration and exercise of power.

On this view, left-wing politics is specifically focused on the limitation of power, on mechanisms for distributing power equitably, and on the excesses that almost inevitably emerge when power is allowed to grow unchecked. The clearest articulation of these views is found in the work of arch right-wing thinker and Cato Foundation cofounder Murray Rothbard.

With no supporting argument or analysis, Rothbard dismisses nearly all the political theory on which democratic rules are based even the monarchist Thomas Hobbes thought that the sovereign represented the people over whom he ruled, in an abstract sense and the entire theory of representative democracy.

At their limit—a limit that is often surpassed in current cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist rhetoric and practice—these views suggest bizarrely that only government is capable of violence, reviiew that even when private institutions and enterprises engage in what appears to be physical violence, it is eoftware some sense of a different order than that practiced by governments.

Even more bizarrely, 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.

The effect is to make such concentrations of power even more possible and even less subject to oversight, and this off very much the direction in which Bitcoin heads.

There are many things worth saying about Bitcoin. This short book is concerned not with providing a thorough description of the technology, a detailed history of its uses, an account of the scandals and triumphs associated with sooftware, or profiles of the various personalities involved in its creation and subsequent use the politics of bitcoin software as right wing extremism review which good introductory resources include Lanchester ; Murray ; Pagliery ; Payne ; Popper ; Robinson ; Scott Its goal is more limited: to show how much of the economic and political thought on which Bitcoin is based emerges directly from ideas that travel the gamut from the sometimes-extreme Chicago School economics of Milton Friedman to the explicit extremism of Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.

As they are currently configured, Bitcoin and the blockchain technology on which it rests satisfy needs that make sense only in the context of right-wing politics; those of us who do not share those politics must, therefore, view Bitcoin and the blockchain with both skepticism and a clear eye for the political terms and concepts invoked in the discourse bitxoin. I am sometimes asked to account for Bitcoin enthusiasm among those with explicitly left-wing politics. My response is to ask two questions analytically prior to this one: first, to ask for accounts of where and how it happened that a technology developed specifically to magnify the powers favored by the political right has mutated so as not to serve those powers but the forces they oppose; and second, to ask for accounts on economic and political-economic grounds that proceed from left- wing thought whether Marxian or Keynesian to the need for and utility of Bitcoin.

Almost uniformly, responses to these queries repeat some of the rightist tropes about central banking and governmental tyranny I describe here, and those that do not e.

Perhaps Bitcoin and the blockchain can serve politics other than the ones from which they were birthed and which they continue to embody; my goal here is to document those politics and to show what any non-rightist politics of Bitcoin needs to overcome. Federal Reserve, the body that has remained a touchstone for the far right in the United States since its creation by the Federal Reserve Act of And its ultimate value to the conspirators could be tremendously enhanced by the character and ability of the good men drawn into its top positions during the early extremiwm of its existence.

But what this function and prestige of the Federal Reserve System would inevitably come to mean, in time and in actual practice, was the control of credit, the control of the money supply, the ability to spend with increasing profligacy, and the means to steal continuously from the people by the debasement of our currency, on the part of the Federal Government. Yet because, according to the JBS, the Fed has been uniquely granted the power to print money in the United States though the Fed does not actually have the power to print money; see Federal Reserve Bank of St.

This description radically misstates economic principles in several important ways. Most economists feel that moderate but not runaway inflation benefits an economy, particularly by encouraging the production of goods, since they may eventually sell for more than the producer would have been able to receive simply by holding on to his or her money the reverse of this dynamic is the main argument against deflation; see Burdekin and Siklos ; Frisch A far more reasonable form of comparison would be to ask whether the average laborer needs to work more or fewer hours to purchase a like good in two different circumstances—for example a quart of milk or a pound of flour.

This is why economists calculate such statistics not in raw numbers but in inflation-adjusted terms: the point is that all prices in an economy tend to adjust with inflation, including labor. The extremist characterization of inflation may have found its way into some parts of popular discourse via its promulgation in JBS and other right-wing propaganda, but it was a theory developed and cultivated by the architects of neoliberal doctrine associated with the Chicago School of economics and the Mont Pelerin Society.

When Friedman was hired as a senior adviser to U. From the farthest reaches of the explicitly anarcho-capitalist fringe e. The proximate source for current Federal Reserve conspiracy theories is found in the sotfware of Eustace Mullins, one of the most prominent and extreme conspiracy theorists in the United States sotfware the twentieth century, and author of the book The Secrets of wimg Federal Reserve.

The main architects of this plan are the Rothschild family, who by dint of being both British and Jewish galvanize the nationalist and racist impulses of U. This power was the financial power of England, centered in the London Branch of the House of Rothschild. The fact was that inthe United States was for all practical purposes being ruled from England, and so it is today. The ten largest bank holding companies in the United States are firmly in the hands of certain banking houses, all of which have branches in London.

They are J. Henry Schroder. All of them maintain close relationships with the House of Rothschild, principally through the Rothschild control of international money markets through its manipulation of the price of gold.

This same line of thought is found in nearly identical form in the conspiratorial propaganda produced today by the Patriot, militia, and Tea Party movements in the United States Flanders ; Lepore ; Skocpol and Williamsonand by prominent conspiratorialists like Alex Jones, Henry Makow, and David Icke. In addition to Mullins, this view is promulgated in the writings of Martin LarsonA. Ralph EppersonG. Bitcoin enthusiasts repackage material from these writers almost verbatim, regardless of whether they know the origins of that material.

Despite the general rightist orientation of much bitconi culture, central bank conspiracism is relatively new there, gaining a foothold only with the introduction of Bitcoin and the blockchain. Bitcoin literature also advances the more subtle extremist argument that inflation and deflation are caused by monetary politicss rather than geview more conventional aspects of economies like consumer prices, commodity and asset prices, productivity and other aspects of labor, and so on.

This view is repeated with remarkable persistence and with a remarkable lack of critical examination in a significant portion of discussions about Bitcoin, regardless of their overt politics. This computer-centric point of view is extremely common throughout digital culture, and it is especially notable in Bitcoin discussions. The implication is that this lack of technical expertise disqualifies the critic from speaking on the iwng at all. Of course, no such parallel expertise is granted to fields like economics and finance, despite their own highly technical nature.

This selective evaluation of individuals based on a self-nominated set of meaningful and not- meaningful criteria fits uncomfortably well with the tendencies toward producerism, anti-elitism, and anti-intellectualism that critics like Berlet e. A fourth and final pillar of extremist thought is also found both inside and outside Bitcoin discourse, but appears there with particular force: the idea that government itself is inherently evil, distinct in kind from other forms of etxremism but not in terms of its responsibility to the democratic polity.

Of course this view flows somewhat directly from the anarcho-capitalist thought of Rothbard and bitcoinn antigovernment neoliberal doctrines of Reagan, Thatcher, and their supporters, the Koch brothers, the Cato and Heritage Foundations, and many. At the limit, these perspectives suggest not simply that current governments are corrupt or misguided, but that the project of governance itself is an idea whose time has passed, one to be superseded by markets and market-like mechanisms that offer no resistance at all to concentrations of power, and no formal means beyond market forces to hold those who abuse power accountable to the rest of us.

Views that appear to be conspiratorial at one time may become established or even proven history at others; conversely, established history can turn out at later moments to have been fabricated. But the conspiracy theories associated with Bitcoin are teh the most deeply entrenched, pervasive, politically charged, yet disproven of all the ongoing lines of political discourse in the United States extremiam Europe. These theories percolate almost exclusively on the extreme political right and serve to some extent ironically to mobilize and contain the rihgt energies of those who subscribe to.

It is sovtware theories that dominate not just Bitcoin rhetoric but also the actual functioning of Bitcoin as politcis and currency: we might say that Bitcoin activates or executes right-wing extremism, putting into practice what had until recently been theory. There is much more about Bitcoin, its culture, and even its politics than can be accommodated in a short survey of its profound engagement with right-wing thought and practice.

Here, my exclusive goal is to trace out this specific line of thought, both because of its urgency and because it has often been misunderstood by some in the media and is continually misrepresented by Bitcoin propagandists. The point is much less that Bitcoin is attractive to those on the right wing, than it is that Bitcoin and the blockchain themselves depend on right-wing assumptions, and help to spread those assumptions as if they could be separated from the context in which they were generated.

Absent an awareness of that context, Bitcoin serves, like much right-wing rhetoric, to spread and firmly root a politics part of whose method is hte obscure its material and social functions. One can buy, sell, trade into and out of, and exchange it for other forms of currency, just as one would trade for any other currency.

There are exchanges where individuals can buy bitcoins for U.

Right Wing Extremism Expert Explains «What the Hell is Going On»

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S law to donate to Wikileaks and it never has. In many cases responses to new technologies depend on the extent to to which they transform or reinforce established wordviews, values or doctrines. In fact, concerns about mechanization fxtremism the Luddites. Everybody knows it, from pension managers and fiduciaries over to FOMC committee members and leftist heroes like Ralph Nader. Consequently, the fluctuations in value are by definition the result of volatility in speculative demand. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. Author content All content in this area was uploaded by Quinn Dupont on Sep 07,