Can crypto avoid politics?
When navigating the crypto landscape, a refreshing feature is that it can appear purely apolitical. Often this is due to a conscious effort by analysts and influencers to maintain a neutral approach and steer clear of contentious issues.
In polarized times, it’s all too easy to alienate sections of your audience with a revealing comment, and in the age of social media, what is usually an innocuous opinion can almost instantly be elevated to a political flashpoint, generating backlash and noise.
With the so-called “culture wars” seemingly still escalating to angrier extremes, it makes sense that many people, if not engaged in a professional capacity, would choose to steer clear of the drama.
And crypto in particular lends itself to cold neutrality. It is a technological development that revolves around code and mathematics. Traders look at charts and technical analysis, and markets, most of the time, at least work in predictable mechanical ways: as long as you know enough about the inputs, you can make a decent estimate of the probability of any number of outputs.
Can politics be avoided altogether?
It may not be possible to avoid politics entirely (and that’s putting aside the argument some might make that avoiding politics is itself a political act). When crypto becomes significant enough for regulators to take an interest, it is necessary for advocates to give voice to crypto-friendly politicians, and to argue for crypto in standard political terms, or at least in ways that answer the questions asked by bureaucrats. institutions.
Widespread institutional adoption may be on the cards, but waiting for a nod from regulators and political entities to indicate that crypto, or at first just bitcoin, is coming in from the fringes and therefore would be irresponsible not to include it in a balanced portfolio.
On the other hand, it is certainly plausible that politicians are now interested in bitcoin, not because it requires establishment approval, but because there is very little they can do to stop it, and so they are forced to incorporate it because if they don’t that, it will simply bypass them and exist on its own terms.
By this calculation, traditional institutions do not absorb bitcoin, but rather the opposite: bitcoin absorbs and replaces traditional institutions. And yet, this does not necessarily make bitcoin political. In fact, it can be seen as a negation of politics.
Different points of view emerge
Although many participants in the crypto space keep their politics to themselves, this is not always the case, and as crypto splinters into multiple technical sections, usually cooperative, sometimes in competition, some recognizable ideological or political characteristics begin to emerge.
The culture around bitcoin itself tends to show strongly libertarian leanings, and is the most explicitly anti-establishment. This is to be expected as it was created as a release from institutional economic dysfunction and also because, in order to grow and attract adoption, it was necessary for proponents to not only articulate the case for bitcoin but also, in the process, develop a identity.
Perhaps this last factor, identity, along with community, was an accidental byproduct. After all, it is not hard-coded or immutable. But still, identity and community have played a significant role in drawing new entrants into bitcoin’s expanding gravitational zone, as its allure becomes not just monetary but cultural.
Self-storage is a critical component of bitcoin’s purpose, and as such it is inevitable that as politics become widespread, individual freedoms and liberties should be at the fore. In American politics, these are currently right-wing priorities, but that is not the case everywhere in the world, and bitcoin could in theory act as an escape hatch from any form of control that happens to intervene at a particular time and place, be it from the left or right, business or something else entirely.
Web3 and NFTs
If there is a contrast to the political philosophy, which is most prominent around bitcoin, then it appears around what we can loosely call web3 projects, and most noticeably in the NFT world.
Web3 is focused on using crypto-technology to develop a decentralized version of the web, where users have ownership of their online identities and assets without the need for third-party approval. This creates a more self-preserving, censorship-resistant experience, which is in line with the bitcoin philosophy, but extends it from money to all online activity.
Web3 projects, however, overlap and intertwine with the existing web2 digital landscape, and are therefore likely to rub shoulders with and absorb the ethos and politics that currently exist in Silicon Valley. This creates a sometimes inconsistent texture, where individual ownership, which equates to individual freedom, is essential to the web3 enterprise, while Silicon Valley has, over the last decade or so, drifted away from libertarianism, with large tech platforms exercising top- and -down control over the user. -generated content.
While by no means true across the board, the crypto space where open support for broadly left-leaning political causes can most easily be found in the NFT space. This may be because many participants come from non-crypto backgrounds, particularly from the world of art and design, and bring with them certain beliefs and loyalties.
But despite potentially opposing views being forced into proximity, it’s very rare in crypto to encounter bad political disagreements, and this perhaps hints at one of crypto’s accidental benefits.
At its core, technology itself is neutral, although different cultures may develop around its divergent branches. Ultimately, there is a universal understanding that freedom, to act and express oneself, is central to crypto’s existence, while exposure to contrasting viewpoints is valuable, and perhaps even an antidote to political polarization.
When navigating the crypto landscape, a refreshing feature is that it can appear purely apolitical. Often this is due to a conscious effort by analysts and influencers to maintain a neutral approach and steer clear of contentious issues.
In polarized times, it’s all too easy to alienate sections of your audience with a revealing comment, and in the age of social media, what is usually an innocuous opinion can almost instantly be elevated to a political flashpoint, generating backlash and noise.
With the so-called “culture wars” seemingly still escalating to angrier extremes, it makes sense that many people, if not engaged in a professional capacity, would choose to steer clear of the drama.
And crypto in particular lends itself to cold neutrality. It is a technological development that revolves around code and mathematics. Traders look at charts and technical analysis, and markets, most of the time, at least work in predictable mechanical ways: as long as you know enough about the inputs, you can make a decent estimate of the probability of any number of outputs.
Can politics be avoided altogether?
It may not be possible to avoid politics entirely (and that’s putting aside the argument some might make that avoiding politics is itself a political act). When crypto becomes significant enough for regulators to take an interest, it is necessary for advocates to give voice to crypto-friendly politicians, and to argue for crypto in standard political terms, or at least in ways that answer the questions asked by bureaucrats. institutions.
Widespread institutional adoption may be on the cards, but waiting for a nod from regulators and political entities to indicate that crypto, or at first just bitcoin, is coming in from the fringes and therefore would be irresponsible not to include it in a balanced portfolio.
On the other hand, it is certainly plausible that politicians are now interested in bitcoin, not because it requires establishment approval, but because there is very little they can do to stop it, and so they are forced to incorporate it because if they don’t that, it will simply bypass them and exist on its own terms.
By this calculation, traditional institutions do not absorb bitcoin, but rather the opposite: bitcoin absorbs and replaces traditional institutions. And yet, this does not necessarily make bitcoin political. In fact, it can be seen as a negation of politics.
Different points of view emerge
Although many participants in the crypto space keep their politics to themselves, this is not always the case, and as crypto splinters into multiple technical sections, usually cooperative, sometimes in competition, some recognizable ideological or political characteristics begin to emerge.
The culture around bitcoin itself tends to show strongly libertarian leanings, and is the most explicitly anti-establishment. This is to be expected as it was created as a release from institutional economic dysfunction and also because, in order to grow and attract adoption, it was necessary for proponents to not only articulate the case for bitcoin but also, in the process, develop a identity.
Perhaps this last factor, identity, along with community, was an accidental byproduct. After all, it is not hard-coded or immutable. But still, identity and community have played a significant role in drawing new entrants into bitcoin’s expanding gravitational zone, as its allure becomes not just monetary but cultural.
Self-storage is a critical component of bitcoin’s purpose, and as such it is inevitable that as politics become widespread, individual freedoms and liberties should be at the fore. In American politics, these are currently right-wing priorities, but that is not the case everywhere in the world, and bitcoin could in theory act as an escape hatch from any form of control that happens to intervene at a particular time and place, be it from the left or right, business or something else entirely.
Web3 and NFTs
If there is a contrast to the political philosophy, which is most prominent around bitcoin, then it appears around what we can loosely call web3 projects, and most noticeably in the NFT world.
Web3 is focused on using crypto-technology to develop a decentralized version of the web, where users have ownership of their online identities and assets without the need for third-party approval. This creates a more self-preserving, censorship-resistant experience, which is in line with the bitcoin philosophy, but extends it from money to all online activity.
Web3 projects, however, overlap and intertwine with the existing web2 digital landscape, and are therefore likely to rub shoulders with and absorb the ethos and politics that currently exist in Silicon Valley. This creates a sometimes inconsistent texture, where individual ownership, which equates to individual freedom, is essential to the web3 enterprise, while Silicon Valley has, over the last decade or so, drifted away from libertarianism, with large tech platforms exercising top- and -down control over the user. -generated content.
While by no means true across the board, the crypto space where open support for broadly left-leaning political causes can most easily be found in the NFT space. This may be because many participants come from non-crypto backgrounds, particularly from the world of art and design, and bring with them certain beliefs and loyalties.
But despite potentially opposing views being forced into proximity, it’s very rare in crypto to encounter bad political disagreements, and this perhaps hints at one of crypto’s accidental benefits.
At its core, technology itself is neutral, although different cultures may develop around its divergent branches. Ultimately, there is a universal understanding that freedom, to act and express oneself, is central to crypto’s existence, while exposure to contrasting viewpoints is valuable, and perhaps even an antidote to political polarization.
