Craptocurrency and other 2022 encounters

It is 2022 and COVID numbers are higher than ever. I have chosen to live my life as close to normally as possible but social has reduced and I caught a flu which is why I have spent quite a lot of time on entertainment lately. In addition to all the crime books and tv shows I have devoured, here is a list of oddities that came my way in January 2022.

Cold War Finland — a documentary series about Finlandization. Lately I have been quite fascinated about the 70–80s because I was alive but did not understand much. This series made it painfully apparent how I have been a victim of the propaganda about Finland as this neutral country between East (Soviet Union) and West (NATO). In reality, we were kissing Soviet ass to survive which still casts a shadow in our foreign policy. And which is why we prefer to recite the Hero’s journey of the Winter War.

At least the Cold War times were clear and the world neatly divided, which is more than one can say about the globalised alt-right chaos tactics. I listened to Johanna Vehkoo’s Oikeusjuttu, which narrates the defamation lawsuit brought against the author by an alt-right politician from my hometown of all places. The politician is well-known for his offensive language, systematic interference and harassment practices and for streaming all of this online to alt-right platforms. The story makes it painfully clear how far behind our legislation has fallen when it comes to dealing with Internet trolling, and Internet and social media in general. I do not envy the journalists and activists who speak on topics that ignite the alt-right hate.

From alt-right chaos tactics to another topic that does not seem to have a meaningful outcome (unless you count money as such): Web3 and craptocurrency. This article in Helsingin Sanomat spoke to me like a charming cult leader as it listed things which should already make us realise that the whole thing should already be deemed ridiculous. Except of course it is very real for those peeps milking the hype while it still has not destroyed the planet. Just to remind everyone:

• The phrase “democratise [add whatever]” has been used also about the first Internet and platforms and neither of those democratised shit because there are material needs (e.g. servers) and because platform economy is an economy of scale where winner takes it all. I am not a techie and while P2P is cool, I completely fail to get excited about the security of transaction records being stored in blocks. And like others, I think it is unlikely it will really run without any central bodies.
• The article contained an interesting point from Vili Lehdonvirta who claims that blockchain lovers want to make it sound mathematical and mechanical and thus objective and trustworthy while in reality it is of course human built and suffers from human organisational problems like any other shared project.
• But hey, tech can still be cool and it is actually the first application of blockchain, craptocurrency, that I detest the most. For me craptocurrency is stock market speculation to the power of ten where the activity around it highlights the madness that is money, value and exchange: we collect nothing to change it to another nothing to buy an NFT or craptokitten (nothing). To paraphrase Saskia Sassen — if all this value was materialised, the whole system would collapse, and mind you, she was talking about mining the bonds and currencies of “analog money”.
• The worst part about this process around nothing is of course its carbon footprint. Fast money has a massive cost.
• There is a flavour of the Web1 bubble in Web3. But I am sure some boys will make a bunch of money, and maybe in the process, they throw out the current kings of the Metaverse and bring on new ones. But democratise? Yeah, no. Web3 is just another technology which accelerates what is underneath and so far it is still us greedy humans.

Maybe something to read by Sassen: Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math