Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
I think that the references to billionaires and capitalism as negatives and the simple fact that they posted it to a solarpunk community make how OP feels pretty clear, but I don’t think we’re going to find much common ground here
I’m confused about where that last paragraph came from? The only thing I’ve said about you is that I think you’re making more assumptions about OP than you are letting on
I don’t understand why I wrote that either looking back at your comment. I apologize for it.
as for a common ground: I feel like you’re saying these things because you think that I believe that this person doesn’t feel that way. The truth is I would be surprised if they didn’t feel that way, for all of the reasons you’re saying. I’m literally just saying that nothing they write establishes with 100% certainty how they feel about the global financial system. Like you literally can only conclude that if you’re willing to make assumptions about what it must mean to post this in solarpunk, what it must mean to be critical of billionaires etc.
And you also need to consider that not everyone even understands all of those things. people come here from all sorts of corners of this little fediverse, you need to consider how they’ll perceive this too if you actually want to steer people away from it. Would they be wrong for failing to connect all those dots if they were never exposed to them before?