#40: Crypto Inferno
A multitude of metaphors and symbols constantly shield each of us from the blinding intensity of the complex, ineffable, unpleasant, ugly, or boring reality that would otherwise overwhelm us within minutes of waking up every morning. Millennia ago these metaphors often took the form of myth; while we all know now that there are no gods living up on Mount Olympus, our secular symbolism isn’t any more rigorous. What is "the cloud” if not an equally broad departure from anything that actually underlies it, one that elegantly covers over a bunch of dull faceless buildings, server stacks, and underground cables, all owned and operated by companies with terrestrial names like “NTT Communications.” Just as the Greeks must have known there weren’t really any deities living up on the mountain, or didn’t care enough to go up on top and check, many of us will never need to learn that Apple doesn’t release our personal data as vapor into the atmosphere, because it will usually be there when we need it.
Occasionally, new ideas or technologies enter the world with such force and immediacy that the metaphors can’t catch up. Cryptocurrency is the modern digital abstraction par excellence, so much so that one of civilization’s all-time great feats of abstraction, money, is a metaphor for it (Benjamin Bratton writes that "Bitcoin has made money into a general design problem, as it should be"). As an idea, cryptocurrency is still in its symbolic adolescence. The clumsy search for imagery to explain it has been fun. Soon we’ll probably end up with a single neat, unifying image like the cloud that saves the masses from ever having to hear about smart contracts or hard forks again, but right now it’s a glorious memetic mess. How does a casual observer reconcile the seriousness of Bitcoin and Ethereum with the frivolity of Dogecoin or KodakCoin under a single conceptual framework? Marshall McLuhan said that money is the poor man’s credit card; maybe memes are the poor man’s cryptocurrency.
And yet, like the rest of the digital sphere, cryptocurrency is grounded in a very real physicality. The symbolism of cryptocurrency evokes a dematerialized quality: air blowing across the water (Ripple), unreal lightness (Ethereum), outer space (Stellar). Like the cloud, though, cryptocurrency doesn’t just float in the air or live in our dreams; it craves raw energy from the earth, frequently in the form of fossil fuels (as the necessity of “mining” it, at least, testifies). In this, of course, cryptocurrency is merely a subset of everything else that happens on the internet, and deserves no special blame. As the world continues to erupt in flames as a consequence of our various unquenchable appetites—for moving our information as much as ourselves—we’d benefit from metaphors that better connect our digital activity to its physical results. Maxwell’s Demon, the 19th-century thought experiment in which a tiny demon reduces entropy within a box of molecules by selectively opening and closing a trapdoor, demonstrates that even information requires physical work and is never free. Perhaps the demon, not the cloud, should stand in for everything we don’t need to see or understand.
Reads:
Resisting the Waze effect: A New Jersey town is banning non-resident cars from its streets after being flooded by navigation-app-rerouted traffic.
Blade Runner in the Gulf. Haven't you always dreamed of visiting a built-from-scratch city in Saudi Arabia that was designed by McKinsey and BCG?
A great interview with Fred Turner on understanding technology as infrastructure. "What I would recommend is not that we abandon technology, but that we deal with it as an integrated part of our world, and that we engage it the same way that we engage the highway system, the architecture that supports our buildings, or the way we organize hospitals."
Until next time,
Drew