A conversation with Brett Scott, an economic anthropologist and former derivatives broker whose book Cloud Money: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for Our Wallets argues that big tech and big finance are fusing and squeezing out physical cash. Scott describes an upwards anthropology that studies powerful institutions rather than remote communities, an impulse that took him into over-the-counter swaps and inflation and property derivatives during the financial crisis, work he treated as immersive and gonzo rather than academic. He explains derivatives as large-scale contractual bets and traces his path from the 2013 activist handbook The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance through years of reporting on alternative currencies. Pinchbeck raises Catherine Austin Fitts and her warnings about centralized digital currency. The exchange ends on physicality and slowness as things worth reclaiming, with cacao beans invoked as a classical Maya currency.
Guest: Brett Scott
In brief
- Scott argues that big tech and big finance are fusing and in the process crushing the cash system, the physical layer of the monetary order.
- Scott describes upwards anthropology as turning the discipline's methods on powerful institutions rather than on distant communities.
- Scott explains derivatives as large-scale contractual bets that can be written on almost anything, comparable to a wager placed outside a horse race.
- Scott says he entered finance to feel how the system moved through him rather than to observe it as an academic with a notebook.
- Pinchbeck raises Catherine Austin Fitts's warning that a centralized digital currency would stop being money in the familiar sense and become credit at a company store.
- Scott closes by arguing that physicality and slowness in money should be reclaimed rather than shunned.
Full text
hey everybody i'm here with uh brett scott who's the author of this uh new book cloud money cash cards crypto and the war for our wallets uh brett scott is an economic anthropologist who also worked in the financial system you know in the the big game for a while so brett you want to tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to write this uh this tome sure thing uh good to be here good to see you again um yeah what led me there it's been probably about 10 years of 10-year trajectory or so i actually have a background in anthropology and history and there's a there's a kind of a tradition in anthropology or a kind of fairly new tradition probably called upwards anthropology where you kind of go into systems of uh or parts of society that are powerful should i say like historically anthropologists would kind of like go downwards in a sense that would go to these sort of far away communities often coming from i wouldn't call that downwards i'd call it outwards right yeah yeah i mean this is i guess but the term i think who made this term upwards was basically upwards and power let's put it that way yeah um and so i was interested in this idea and kind of like i was like let me explore the financial system and so back back in the midst of the financial crisis i actually went into the financial sector work worked in derivatives contracts and sometimes it was called like high finance like complicated finance um did that for a couple of years but i was always coming from quite a left-wing background so i kind of created a sort of interesting hybrid between um my left wing views and my my knowledge of finance and i guess since then i put out a book in 2013 called the heretics guide to global finance which was basically a guide for activists on how to take on the financial sector and since that came out that was 2013 i kind of just you know traveled around the world looking at different attempts to create alternative forms of finance alternative currencies alternative economic models more generally but also looking at campaigns around the financial sector and the monetary system and then i started looking a lot into the intersection between big tech and big finance um and this has kind of culminated in cloud money which goes into you know the dynamics the political dynamics the monetary system in particular how you know big tech and big finance are fusing together and in the process kind of crushing the cash system which is the physical the physical mandatory system that we have that makes sense yeah it probably makes sense um but you worked for a while what were you doing in the financial system you work for derivatives or something like that i can't remember yes i was working for a startup brokerage company doing over-the-counter over-the-counter swaps and i mean i guess your listeners don't really need to know what those are but basically in very broad brush terms derivatives are essentially just bets large-scale contractual bets on things out in the world so and you can kind of create derivatives out of anything really you can you know and in many ways like a like a horse racing bet it's like a horse derivative like a horse racing derivative you're there's a race going on you stand on the outside and you watch it and then the the outcome you're better to be here but it's sort of derived from what's happening in the horse race and it's very similar in the financial markets with derivatives you kind of can set out some contract saying you know hey if if this happens you will pay me and if something else happens i will pay you and that's the kind of like a derivatives contract but i was working in inflation derivatives and property derivatives were you doing that as an anthropologist or was it just like you're you're you know i mean and you started just as well you know i would i wouldn't say like like an academic anthropologist i say i was doing it with a very sort of anthropological impulse but that's like different to being a sort of an official anthropologist sort of sitting in an institution there are anthropologists who do go into financial institutions and as i said there's this tradition of upward anthropologies where you kind of go into these powerful institutions but i wasn't like sitting there with a notebook or something you know doing observation i was i was very experientially involved in it so it was a little bit more like almost like gonzo style journalism or kind of very experiential process and a lot of what i'm often trying to do in my explorations is to kind of like feel the emotions of systems or to kind of embody them in some kind of way rather than just having a mere intellectual understanding of them yeah um so from in many ways it's like i was trying to touch the financial sector in a quite a sort of personal way and sort of feel how it like would go through me um you know but that's that's kind of what what i was doing really is it's a bit experiential adventure yeah and i think a lot of what you did apparently that first book i guess was kind of um you know i mean sort of try to demystify the workings of the financial system okay we got cut off for a second we were talking about you kind of what part of what you've been doing um at least with the earlier book was demystifying kind of global finance which you know i think most normal people see it as a very impenetrable almost like deliberately um kind of obfuscated realm um so um yeah you don't even know you know it's kind of like the glass surfaces like a huge skyscraper you don't even know how to you know relate to it and um yeah so so the new book you know interface with a lot of my own interests and curiosity have you looked into uh catherine austin fitz at all do you know her uh not specifically no kind of surprising she talks a lot a lot about the same issues i mean she was um a republican i think candidate a cabinet member uh who um maybe for reagan or bush or something maybe commerce secretary or something but she's been kind of caught you know raising the alarm around um digital uh centralized you know digital currencies uh she says that you know if that was to happen essentially it's no longer money in the traditional way we understand it it's more like we're all we all have credits on the company's store you know yeah yeah so um so maybe talk a little bit about um what are some of the trends that you're that you're talking about you talk about the integration of big tech and big finance uh and um yeah like you know what what what do you see as the the dangers of that why is it so seductive uh you know you know for for the financial players and to some extent for people too i mean actually i was just in norway recently and it was the first time i've ever visited a country and never touched the cache of that country everything was so uh digitized and in a way it was kind of like beautifully elegant and simple to just be like okay boom boom boom you know you're in that way yeah yeah so let's let's let's hear about um kind of you know well this is there's different angles on my new book cloud money so on the one hand i'm doing a critique of cashless society all right but i'm also what i'm very interested in is actually the the contradictions of our experience of these systems as you say actually many people will find themselves buying into these ideas right will find themselves saying actually you know this is quite nice even though they're simultaneously aware that they're these ever larger big tech companies ever larger financial players they are becoming inextricably dependent upon right so we're often stuck in this very difficult situation in large scale economies where we kind of like we're aware that we're being captured but we don't quite know how to stop that and sometimes we even kind of like it right and this is a part of the fundamental contradiction that many people are facing so what i'm trying to do in the book at least one part of us to sort of cut through inauthenticity because if you hang around the standard fintech scene or the standard like any kind of mainstream circles there's a very specific way this is spoken about so they'll say people are moving away from cache or moving away from analog forms more generally and moving to these big systems because it's more convenient and because everyone desires these things so there's very much this idea that changes in society are driven by the sort of ordinary person and this is something you find in market economics you know very standard economics this is kind of like an underlying assumption in economics that um the world is driven by quote unquote consumers right she'll say i'll say people you know there's this kind of phrasing which is saying you know consumers want this consumers want that and that's why things happen in the world um and then cloud money what i'm trying to do is to say okay fine look there might be some aspects of of uh you know we might find ourselves choosing these digital systems but often what's been happening is that much larger scale players have been recalibrating our economic landscape uh very deliberately to make it ever more likely that we will become captured by their systems right and we might experience that from our kind of like myopic perspective on the ground as like you know me downloading the app on or to use apple pay or something but if you sort of zoom out you'll see that structurally what's happening in the economy is and corporate capitalism really is in order to scale and uh accelerate the profits impulse these big players big tech and big finance have to fuse right and a lot of the ideology will come after that after the fact right what's the sort of underlying driver in the economy is that these players are scaling up and grabbing power but that will create a bunch of cultural um messages which will say oh ordinary people desire this and that's why this is happening all right so the book is trying to cut through a lot of that kind of in a way to say look what's really happening is a power power grab and you might enjoy that you might actually enjoy being captured by these corporations but let's not you know beat around the bush that's you know that's what's happening here um i think that's what the sort of fundamental contradiction that we often find ourselves in a modern corporate capitalist economy is yeah it's very interesting i mean um there's so many different aspects of my first one i really loved your equation of the monetary system with the nervous system in the body um and sort of talking about both the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system and how cash economy is kind of like a peripheral nervous system can you can you elaborate on that a little bit what some of those ideas sure sure by the way your sound's kind of just gone down on my my side i don't know if that's can you hear me okay yeah you just use a little bit light but uh i can hear you but um yeah so i use a lot of metaphor in my writing and part of that is because when you're trying to reveal invisible systems super large scale monetary systems for example are not really visible to people right you can kind of see the surface levels of them but you can't really see the whole structure so i use a lot of metaphor to try and create sort of standard visual imagery for these systems and then historically with monetary systems the way people would would metaphorically speak about them was almost as like circulatory systems a bit like the blood okay i'm back so i'm okay i like the blood okay i'll see all right so now let me go back yeah so so like typical typical economics the way they speak about money is like a kind of substance of value right just like all the languages imagines like money carries something around with it right which is a bit like this and this lead lends itself to these blood metaphors it's like the financial sector is the beating heart the economy it pumps blood to the industries and that's why the industries survive and this is very core in the sort of ideology of finance is that it's it's the thing that keeps industries alive and so blood metaphors are very very prevalent in monetary thinking but i think they're extremely misleading right so from my perspective but not only my perspective many people who have more heterodox takes on the economic system will say the underlying let's say like tissues or substance of value of an economic system is you know human beings and ecological systems you know every single type of human activity going way back in time to pre-capitalist communities basically involves human beings using their their bodies and their energy to apply to the earth all right and that's the only way you get anything all right now in a modern market economy that's still the case that's still the underlying source of value but what we have in a modern market economy is that you have these vast networks of people who are engaged in that activity but who coordinate via these monetary systems and so in many ways the monetary system is far more like a kind of embedded nervous system than a circulatory type system and actually the financial sector can be thought of as a kind of very centralized part of an overall nervous system so in our own bodies we'll have a central nervous system and then these it's spread out across the body into these other types of nervous systems but in terms of like you know if i want to make a hundred thousand people do something on the planet you know i can go via the financial sector right so to sort of mobilize huge amounts of these kind of like monetary impulses and then you can blast out to like mobilize action on the planet so it's far more like you know me sending a message to a part of my body to sort of make it move right so um and actually this helps people understand a lot of things like inflation and stuff you can understand them far better if you have this metaphor because a large part of the problem with the um you know if i'm using this sort of bodily metaphor if i uh sometimes i'll talk about if i've been rock climbing all day right and my arms are exhausted i've basically exhausted the underlying tissues i can send messages from my brain trying to activate my arms to tell them to do things but they can be very sluggish and slow they're not going to do very much right and this is very similar to for example when you have outstripped your resources and your human capacity in an economy you can try to throw money at that situation but nothing's going to happen you can't mobilize more action right whereas if you have underlying energy and underlying capacity and resources you can issue new money and create new action right that's the whole dark art of monetary policy it's about mobilizing new people and new resources into action via the issuance of new money all right and the politics of monetary systems are all about who gets to do that on what scale and with what kind of activities right and so much of the sort of political dynamics of monetary systems is about is that happening in a democratic fashion where does that money get steered for what purposes and so on so and also what form does that money take right you talked about uh your home country zimbabwe as um when they tried to force money into a broken system right it was like they had a lame arm um yeah very much and this is the kind of it's quite useful these bodily metaphors because if you think about an economy it's like a super organism which because we're all tied into these vast interdependent networks that's how we survive right so in a sense we are nobody's an individual in the economy you can't survive unless you have access to huge transnational supply chains from other people right you basically are in a super organism well there are some like i visited some communities like indigenous communities in you know colombia or something who actually are not part of that like they're totally safe yeah sure so there will be smaller networks right so but for most people in the world right now with the spread of global capitalism most people have been at least partially integrated into a kind of global super organism but of course if you are an uncontacted group in you know deep amaze and you could actually have a sort of independent autonomous network which operates in its by its own dynamics it's also going to be a super organism in the sense that no individual person in that society is surviving by themselves but they just use it at a much smaller scale right so much of the dynamics of you know monetary systems is that they hold together these networks of people they're not the only things that hold them together but that's one of the big um things going on but and this this this helps you analyze situations where for example in zimbabwe you know if you have a weak government in the context where you've ruined your underlying you know economic body as it were and then you try to just push money into that situation yes you're going to create hyperinflation but if you have a healthy body of people and you have a bunch of resources actually if you push money into that situation you're just going to mobilize new production so you know and for example in the us you've seen the rise of the mmt movement modern monetary theory they talk a lot about this kind of stuff as well right i mean uh yeah there's a number of things that one thing i wanted to say is i wrote a book called how soon is now and i got very interested in the super organism metaphor that somehow humanity and the earth as a whole system constitutes some kind of planetary super organism i talked about kind of the uh you know the energy companies like you know fossil fuels renewables is more like the circulatory the blood moving through the body kind of you know whether it's yeah for sure media companies is kind of the sensory organs that are taking in like raw data and converting it into like memes that the whole body kind of uses to orient itself um you know something like sanitation companies or like the you know kidney or something breaking down waste material or something so that sounds cool i knew i needed to look at this yeah so i hadn't thought about the money the money as the nervous systems that makes perfect sense well actually you actually see the metaphor in a way you've got to think about it it's more because the nervous system is obviously you know has multiple things but actually the financial sector you might want to think about it as the motor cortex which is a particular part of the nervous system that translates thought into action right so you know you might be for example some brilliant entrepreneur sitting in your garage and you have these brilliant thoughts but nobody in the world is going to act upon that unless you can actually mobilize them by the monetary system so in a sense if you when you're approaching like venture capitalists you're saying hey can you give me this type of like ability to mobilize a bunch of developers right so there's this there's this whole sort of functional financial sector which is about the mobilization of action um via this sort of interdependent nervous system type and part of my arguments around the protection of the cash system is that the cash system which is the units of physical money that we use it forms a type of peripheral nervous system which is much more localized than its actions right whereas your kind of digital systems tend to favor the conglomeration of power into massive centralized entities like amazon absolutely i mean what i guess um you know a question that i have often posed to myself and not sort of the answer of i mean if you look at that book what's his name robert wright non-zero the sort of logic of human destiny or something which was a big book for obama and clinton or maybe clinton i guess but he kind of you know i mean or in my work i talked about the concept of the newest fear that people like jose arguelles borrowed from like taylor de chardon and so on so it's like this idea that there's some kind of an absorbable and honorable movement like evolutionary movement so there was the pristine life of the biosphere and humanity came around and we started converting the biosphere to what arguellus calls the technosphere which is sort of this like intermediate realm you know of sort of cultural and technological creations which has now kind of girdled the whole planet you know in the anthropocene somewhere like transforming the planet but maybe there's another layer or level that we're moving towards which is the newest sphere which is like a sort of collective like you know like a sort of synchronized super organism uh and in a way and maybe that's why there's both the sort of horror and exhilaration around what's happening because we feel like we're being absorbed into this kind of planetary super supermind we don't trust the direction of it or who's leading it yeah but but but maybe there is a sense that that is um i mean you know you know that there there's something like you know we're moving towards inexorably a kind of a kind of you know massive you know yeah and i guess part of the wide system or something like that i mean this this gets quite sort of trippy but like part of the question you want to ask yourself in any kind of big sort of super organism type is let's say a highly interdependent network of people all right at vast scale is what kind of impulses will be can you actually can thrive and flourish in that particular setting all right and part of the intuition of people who sort of horrified to some extent what happens in economic systems is that only very particular impulses can actually be acted upon in these large-scale networks all right so actually if you're thinking about for example um so you know when i've and i worked in the financial sector and since when i when i left the financial sector i used to i would go and i kind of for a while dabbled in like sustainable finance and stuff like this and you always have these meetings with these ceos who would have this sort of strange like double life and so in the and when they left their office they were a human being right they were able to experience many different emotions they had cared for their kids they had all these kind of things like a normal human being has when they stepped into their institutional role they were basically only able to act upon the profit impulse all right give or take like a few degrees right and they they basically say okay we like green finance insofar as it doesn't fundamentally alter the profit impulse right so when they're operating operating at that scale they basically can only act upon this like accumulation impulse right and this is something you can say like well our whole economic system is calibrated to only be able to act in this direction and you can only kind of go green provided it doesn't conflict with that core principle right and this is a big sort of um and this this is what leads itself to this feeling that actually in our logical economic systems we're not really in control we're kind of just like channeling some force that sort of transcends us right and i guess many sort of social movements often trying to like channel other values or other ideas of how that's how what what forces should be going through these networks but and that's kind of an ongoing battle right yeah i mean right somehow the efficiency of the capitalist system is still you know or sort of the limited you know efficiency of it and that it's also taking apart the ecosystems of the planet which you know doesn't seem that efficient it's very it's been you know it's been hard to figure out a you know avenue of significant like resistance or alternative yeah many people try that keeps winning the game um i had a number let's see um oh yeah i wanted to let's see let's talk about um um well okay let's start with cash i mean i i guess i felt a little bit when you know even your conclusion around oh you know cash we gotta hold on to it it reminded me a little bit now that i'm thinking about it like that that al gore movie the inconvenient truth where you see this you know huge movie about how terrifying ecological crisis is in the end he's kind of like well you can you know recycle you know your light bulbs you can get these like low light light bulbs actually wouldn't bought those low light light bulbs they're terrible they don't even like the house i mean you know it feels like when we're looking at this huge monstrosity of this you know coordinated centralization big tech big finance you know goldman sachs and amazon and meta you know all kind of like building this like interweave of uh you know automation and so on and then to say that somehow cash is going to be you know a serious impediment or resistance it's sort of hard yeah seriously because it's like i after i read you know some of your book i went out and i took out a few hundred bucks in cash you know and i picked it up okay i've got some cash now all that cash is gone do i go out and take like a few hundred more dollars of cash you know yeah i could buy it yeah yeah but it doesn't really seem like a very significant you know form of uh resistance to some of this octopus in a way you know yeah yeah look in cloud money i don't necessarily i'm doing a kind of like meta critique of this and i don't necessarily have some strong set of policy you know uh recommendations at the end in a way the books intended to sort of like put the issue on the table um and then spur further debate about it but yeah so like kind of going back a bit you know we were just talking about how like you know global capitalism has this sort of like autopilot kind of feeling to it it'll just sort of tend towards certain things and it will tend towards increased scale speed complexity and automation right which is why our sort of dominant cultural ideologies you just find this idea that it's inevitable that cash must die because it's it essentially goes against those impulses it slows things down it creates friction which if you're if your objective of your system is to scale and ever increasing speed and so on that goes against the grain so you'll have these ideological formations which say cash is old it's out of date it's an impediment blah blah blah blah right now um so in a way when i'm at the end of the book where i sort of talk about using cash is almost like a type of meditation and a system that's accelerating you know i don't literally believe that in consumer activism type stuff which is like you know as long as you know in the environmental realm that's like you know as long as you recycle everything will be fine you know you know that's the kind of typical consumer sort of action type thing in the realm of money like okay fine it would be great if people uh assert the right to use cash but that's not going to be the thing that's going to sort of um that's not going to be a highly effective form of resistance at a meta scale but it's an interesting personal challenge because if for example you are in a place like sweden or you are in a place that's rapidly losing the um well in a place that's a place is rapidly collapsing into dependence upon big finance and big tech using cash has a strange feeling to it it feels almost like a type of resistance you feel how you're out of sync with everybody else in the economic network you're sort of slumping into this other system right so like that in a way is a kind of interesting experiential process but in terms of like the actual um there's a bigger aspect of the cache system which is they factor the cash system remains the biggest system of payment in the world right so we're not talking about some marginal system that's like it's not sort of some you know marginal anarchist commune trying to run like you know a an intentional community right the cash system is huge right it's still extremely important and actually it's crucial for financial stability so even from a centrist perspective even if you're just like a sort of straightforward like you know middle of the road kind of liberal slash conservative whatever like a sort of middle centrist the cash system actually is very crucial for the normal operation of capitalism it's just that it's um the way that operates goes against the dominant ideology of corporate capitalism all right but if you think about how do you maintain the stability of the monetary system actually the cash isn't very crucial precisely because it creates resilience in the monetary system okay so even serious policy makers serious central bankers you know security people who are interested in how do you protect your monetary system from cyber attacks they're increasingly realizing that the cash system is actually crucial especially in a future where you have climate change and potential you know not only increased geopolitical risks but um and sort of cyber attack kind of risks but also just like natural disasters it's not actually obvious that um being totally dependent on digital infrastructures is a prudent choice so i'm you know people sometimes say to me ah cause this is futile you're not gonna be able to stop this and i'm like well i don't know you know there's um i don't think it's obvious that there's going to be a complete uh dying of the analog i think we could see a very strong return to analog systems in future so certainly i mean it feels like the technological singularity and the ecological catastrophe are like strangely neck and neck and in a weird way like if we didn't have an ecological catastrophe coming we would be doomed because the the tools of indoctrination and control that countries like china or finessing or that the world economic forum even is is finessing you know they just seem like they're so totalizing but the fact that you know breakdowns may actually mean that we have to go more local may actually turn out to be something that preserves you know different sets of human and local values over time you know yeah and i think we live very much many of our at least in my opinion many of our dominance cultural messages actually come from the corporate sector right so we we we live under a dominant cultural ideology that says ever-increasing speed scale automation and interconnection are always better the complexity is always better all right and that's because that's what jives with the profit optimization impulse of a large-scale corporation right but that's that's a very short-sighted approach you know complex systems are highly subject to crashes you know sometimes quite it's sometimes actually more advanced to have a simpler system right there's nothing inherent about complexity speed and scale that make them better all right so i think yeah i'm i'm like happy to stick to my guns and say i think the cash system's gonna survive and it's probably gonna get stronger at a certain point in future but that message right now goes completely against the dominant ideology of course right and many people have internalized that ideology so if you hang around especially younger people because you know younger people are born into younger people are your perfect market for for any industry right because they're the sort of most susceptible to wanting to differentiate themselves from their elders and like also most susceptible to peer pressure so of course if you like focus in on your kind of gen z's is that there's big tech has got very large levels of capture all right and they can often weaponize that to make people who haven't signed up to that those systems feel out of sync feel like they're behind the times and so on right but i actually think you could start to see backlashes from younger generations at some point as they start to start to dawn on them this level of capture that's that's uh another issue is you know uh what is everybody going to do i mean like you talk about the you know i mean amazon is now creating new stores that basically have no they don't need any people you know they're fully automated um so no cashiers you maybe need like a couple managers you know and you talk about in the book about the you know the banks are also automating they don't need tellers anymore then they don't even need like middle managers the automation keeps moving up into higher and higher reaches so then we you know i mean you know 20th century the idea was you know if people had good jobs then they had you know money to buy the goods that were being produced by the system and that and that led to like an you know unprecedented period of kind of expansion and wealth and you know growth in the middle class like you know what what is what is this automated you know increasingly automated system moving towards you know yeah yeah well i mean this is we're quite a far away from reaching the sort of final expression of whatever that if you push play on a corporate capitalist system where it goes to you know like we're quite far away from seeing the final version of that but certainly and this is a very old school like marxist kind of impulse there are huge amounts of contradictions you know in a large-scale market system the individual actions of market players will often actually undermine themselves collectively all right so they will all try to automate because that's how you try to like optimize your profit your equation right so they all do this thing but in the process they undermine their uh customer base because how do you survive in a large scale interdependent network held together by monetary systems well you have to earn an income right and you know so if you've if you're sitting there like and you and you only think about the sort of um yeah if you cannot think about the full circuitry of the system you might say to yourself as an individual ceo oh it's in my interest to automate everything but actually at a collective level you're going to screw yourself right and this is going to lead to all the systemic breakdown in these systems this is partially why we're having all these debates about ubi right now because at some level the capitalist class is starting to realize that at least the ones in silicon valley because precisely because they don't even need any at you know in historical and historical um perspective they need very few employees to serve billions of people yeah all right tiny relation between the number of people who work for them and how many people use their systems right which is a recipe for systemic collapse right or it could be a recipe for systemic liberation right like i mean well yeah if you believe in like one of my favorite essays is oscar wilde's essay uh the soul of man under socialism uh do you know it uh i i've i've heard about it but i haven't actually read it it's so beautiful i totally recommend reading it's basically my like you know political economic philosophy i mean he basically says that you know look i mean the reason that you know in the past people became great artists or you know poets is because they happen to be wealthy like they had the trust funds so they could actually cultivate their unique individuality over to over the course of their lives and you know what we really want is a way that everybody or as many people who want to can cultivate their unique individuality whether that means they express themselves as artists or poets or gardeners or you know architects or whatever so he said that ultimately what we would want is um to reduce or eliminate human drudgery you know so we would want you know we don't want and this is kind of like at the moment automation is seen as like a horrible thing by like you know and for good reason by like the working class like for instance like if they you know managed to perfect self-driving trucks that's three million people out of work in the u. s and that's like the best job you can get you know without a college degree in the us is you know probably truck driving so you know of course that you know and it's the neoliberals the democrats are you know more pushing this type of automation i think was it you who noticed noted in your book that's kind of pushing people towards the right wing in a way like this the sort of beginning of revolts against technocracy is something that the right is capitalizing on better yeah but so you know so then the idea is to go back to traditional systems and everyone should start working in like the car factories again or whatever and you know maybe d indus i don't know but you know so wild would be like no like this is the beginning of human liberation like if we actually were given a decent ubi and people could you know choose to you know he talks about you know the for him the goal of human existence is not uh work but uh cultivated leisure you know yeah well the problem is the problem is right and like in a capitalist system technology is never used to increase leisure it's always used to expand production right this is why despite the fact that we have unprecedented unprecedented amounts of technology we're busier than ever before all right because the technology is never used to save time it's used to increase the scale and speed and acceleration of the system right now the left-wing accelerationist impulse which you find you can find it in marks you find all sorts of like historical things among these sort of left marxist type groups bets upon something like saying okay well if you let the system run there'll eventually be a process where some kind of socialization of the machine happens all right we'll have these huge automated corporations that basically control vast amounts of stuff there'll be massive inequality that emerges from that there'll be some kind of revolution because it's going to break and then somehow this is going to lead to this sort of you know prose test whereby these become not collectively owned and then everyone lives in some kind of like luxury automated utopia right this is the sort of and it's like i don't know if i want to take that bet to be honest like yeah that might that might happen but i wouldn't want to like sit and assume that's going to happen by any means for many ordinary labor movements beyond the kind of like left intelligentsia circles um in reality it's like that's like a pipe dream right it's going to be like in reality we are trying to protect our basic incomes we'll try to protect our ability to survive within this system that like haunts us okay so you know i i actually get and i come in under attack to some extent from some elements of the kind of like left accelerationist movements who who sort of who like don't like the luddites impulse that i sometimes channel they're like well you know like uh let these systems run but it's um yeah i don't know i'm just not i'm just not convinced that that's what will actually happen in an economic system um and there's another part of me that also has kind of like a bit of a existentialistic sort of um maybe like a narco primitivist sort of edge somewhere how you describe it whereas i basically think human beings become unhappy in large-scale highly automated systems so the luxury communist utopia type idea which is like oh we all collectively own the technology then somehow we just like idle around and and have fun i i just don't find it convincing i don't think people end up in a stable state in that situation i think they're it will experience all forms of like contradiction and angst in that situation and actually we'll try like um yeah so but it's a tricky debate you know what i know right now is that we should we see no signs necessarily of like some socialization of the corporate sector about to happen right we increasingly see signs that there's going to be alliances between authoritarian governments and corporations to for increased forms of social control um and i think that's looking more like a kind of you know like a little bit like what you see in sort of cyberpunk you know science fiction with these sort of you know warlike corporations and stuff like that that's more i see a slightly more dystopian edge to the future than the utopian one to be honest right well i mean yeah i mean as i said i wrote this book how soon is now where i try to figure it out you know from my own terms and i mean part of the problem is that you know the work all the work that actually needs to be done uh for the sake of our future and the sake of the planet is um doesn't really mesh with capitalism yeah so for instance like you know the un says that by 2065 like the you know the top soils are so depleted that we can't you know harvest food anymore you know and the answer to that would be to break up you know the industrial farms and recreate small like organic permaculture farms that you know replenish topsoil you know so you know that's the kind of thing that needs to happen or you know rooftop gardens built you know in every city you know insulation to reduce you know heat loss uh there's a massive number of things that need to be done you know so in a way you know my ideal model with this one would be a ubi and then a refocusing so it's not like people don't do work anymore but they they're they're their basic you know nut is covered so that we can you know refocus on the things that you know we need to do to you know aquaculture is another one like if you did huge aquaculture of kelp farming you could leech a lot of the co2 out of the ocean without that the oceans are going to be dying you know and we're already our kind of on the last legs um yeah i wanted to look good yeah i was going to say you know like often when i'm thinking about like you know capitalism or capital c and it's sort of sometimes a bit of like a you know amorphous word but i i think you know the way i often think about it is it's it's a dominant force within our society but it's not the only force right so it's something that channels through our bodies all the time and it's sort of like we're stuck in these vast networks that tend to do certain things that's what we would often call capitalism it tends to the centralization of power in these large institutions and so on but there are these other forces so i'm always wary of being like two of earthly deterministics a lot of these sort of when you're projecting these models forward saying hey this will auto automatically lead to vast centralization and huge like mega corps that will have like militaristic tendencies and so on you know that might happen but there are of of course countervailing tendencies within human society and obviously the overall economic system you know has it's you know it's vast so there's lots of different tendencies within it right so i'm not i'm sure it's possible to that we can form new types of social formations but often you know when i'm if i'm sort of thinking at a meta level when i'm in my experience with alternative economy movements often often you know what's what's going on is like your dominant system is a little bit like a vortex it's like a tornado that's just like sucks everything into it and when you're trying to create some alternative model it's a little bit like trying to you know bear down a tent in the middle of a storm you're sort of pulling against the grain so you know the history of alternative economy is littered with all these like dead campsites yeah right where you can sort of see the like the remains of where it's been pulled out you know some dead website or some you know local currency project or permaculture project right and this is but there's this constant impulse to pull against the dominant 10 tendencies in the system and a lot of like i guess what captivates the imagination and sort of modern like for example in the web 3 movement is partly around you know can you sort of um find ways to you know make these sort of federations of smaller players that sort of collectively have some kind of power to pull against the dominant system whilst being partially integrated into it all right um so i think there is there are some like interesting tendencies going on right now and i think you know it's um yeah well it's kind of waffling yeah that was the next subject i wanted to get into was you know blockchain crypto uh ethereum um kind of curious i know you talked you touched on that in the book i mean um uh i've actually just um did an interview with a friend who um was kind of uh uh on the beginning of you know in the beginning of ethereum and was one of the people who created metamask and so on and uh you know i guess some of that came out of a more like libertarian ideology um yeah i'm curious uh how you see um you know web 3 blockchain maybe ethereum bitcoin kind of meshing in with this this larger you know reality that you're talking about the first thing i say is i make quite a strong distinction between like bitcoin and the rest of the scene right so i in my monetary work i have specific critiques and points about bitcoin which don't really apply beyond beyond that um but you know can you mention quickly what some of those are um yeah sure i mean look in the early parts of the bitcoin community and i was involved in the early days of the london bitcoin community it very much was explicitly pitched if you zoom back in time you know a lot of the um technological um elements that came together to form bitcoin were forged in the 1990s the sort of cypherpunk movements who actually very explicitly were looking forward in time and saying hey in a cashless society and future we can have serious problems or surveillance control censorship and so on and we need to be thinking about that that situation right so a lot of the um yeah technological innovations that were later put into a recipe that formed the bitcoin system came out of an impulse and a concern about what happens when big tech and big finance and big states fuse right so they do very much sit in this landscape which i'm writing about you know um and you know but bitcoin of course was the first one that came out and made this overt claim to being a kind of new uh peer-to-peer digital cache and i subsequently have become known as kind of like a bitcoin critic partly because i don't uh toe the line with the standard ideology that's pumped up by your standard bitcoin promoters right um in broad terms i the reason why i'm disliked by the bitcoin community is partly that i see the bitcoin system more like a parasitic system right rather than some counter trade object i think yeah yeah and i think this is fascinating right so i don't actually see this as a critique you know in an ecosystem parasites are actually quite advanced forms you know there's nothing wrong with being a parasite it works you know it's a you can you you know they're very successful creatures right bob dylan once said show me somebody who's not a parasite i'll go out and sing a say a prayer for them yeah yeah well what's i know that was that which song was that from i don't know actually but i definitely know that one um but yeah i see the bitcoin system as a parasitic system in the sense that it actually um depends upon the us dollar system as its host it doesn't actually work unless it's not treated as a um speculative object within a much bigger monetary system all right but once it has that once it's embedded in that that host as it were it actually has this ability to be used for forms of exchange via this process of counter trade which i talk about a lot the problem about this narrative is it goes against the self image of the bitcoin community who like to imagine themselves as some kind of apex predator who's going to like take down the us dollar system right so they have this like delusional sort of like idea that their system doesn't actually depend upon dollar pricing that somehow it will culminate in this like you know some sort of a millennial kind of like like shift where suddenly everything's like price and bitcoin or something but it's like there's like no evidence of that whatsoever and it also structurally is not able to do that now so so my my position on bitcoin is actually quite useful as a sort of parasitic form that rides upon the us dollar and i don't think there's anything wrong with that but that of course goes against the ideology and unfortunately the ideology which is used to market these objects has a lot of deeply conservative uh political uh orientation to it right so in the process of trying to market this sort of parasitic system the uh bitcoin proponents have to pump out a bunch of very conservative monetary ideology all right which i i personally hate all right um so that's i have a whole specific body of critique around bitcoin but of course i recognize that obviously it's also brought into play a lot of creativity it's led to people who had their own critiques and then gone and forked it and done new things and this obviously led to a whole efflorescence of activity in this sort of broader space right so it's a mixed bag really when you're looking at the sort of crypto world but you know going back to the thing we're saying earlier about attempts great alternative economy the crypto world is quite interesting in the sense that it very very explicitly rides upon the speculative dynamics of of global capitalism to try and like pull new realities into being right so if you're mentioning a bit you know the the main corporate capitalist system is being like a huge storm it's almost like they kind of like throw i don't know if trying to give them the metaphor right but i threw like kites into it by these token issuances trying to pull themselves and sort of bootstrap themselves and so a lot of crypto projects are sort of stuck in this weird state where they're totally dependent upon like you know the speculative markets but are hoping that they can use those markets to sort of um bring into being new types of like economic systems and what about um ethereum sort of the dao nft kind of developments yeah i mean i think ethereum was very much in this the space you know like um the ethereum community is quite interesting in the sense that they they tend to have kind of a bit more of a varied ideological vibe there'll be this sort of libertarian components there but there's also these are quite sort of like progressive elements and like it the the it's a more malleable uh platform so it'll it lends itself to a lot of different versions right so um on the hard end you can find especially in the early days of the theorem you'd find this very like hard almost like uh what's the word like kind of like borg like thinking where they'd be like we can create these like vast automated systems that nobody can control right so the early the very first like dao i don't remember it was called the dao they they explicitly said it's like governed by the unstoppable force of code and it's like this is like some sort of autonomous force can never be changed which is actually quite like a robotic vision right but since then since the dao got like that one collapsed spectacular collapse it actually ditched the whole ethereum thing back together in a very human way with like yeah and that's actually made a lot more interesting because the vision of dao is now actually moved to be quite human right it used to be very like robotic and now it's become a lot more kind of like soft around the edges in the sense that they they want these governance systems they're interested in like how do you sort of merge human decision making processes into these automated systems and there's a lot of interesting experimentation there right i'm not i think there's there's certainly a lot of stuff being learned now the on the dark side though these systems also use for like hyper commodification of stuff right there's all this tokenization of everything you can try and like you know basically like turn everything into um you create all these like voucher type systems with these tokens and you can use it trying you know if you want access to a community you're going to buy access via tokens or if you want to like there's a lot of the sort of commodification mentality within that as well right have you looked at the crypto syllabus uh website i mean there's something very very very very very jenny's getting stuff it's got good stuff what's that if any of guernies platform yeah yeah i was really interested in like they talk about how like um in a smart contract system you lose a lot of kind of the sort of ambiguity and messiness of human legal structures which actually are protective for people yeah yeah looks like if i rent an apartment and i can't pay my rent one month they can't just immediately evict me we have to go to the courts maybe we negotiate maybe i bring the rent down you know but at least i have like three to six months like figure my life out with a smart contract you know the january 1st will come around and boom the door will lock or the killer drone will appear on your doorstep and yeah yeah so well at least at least i'd say i would say that that was the dominant way of thinking about it in the first the early days this is why crypto has been so ambiguous is that in many ways it actually goes along with the same automation tendencies you'll find in corporate capitalism right big corporates want to automate stuff as well right but like and fintech is all about automating finance and actually many of these platforms are doing exactly the same thing they're saying well we just create these smart contracts which are just like these basically robots right on the system which will you have to behave in a deterministic way um and you know so there's this big automation idea and also about doing it at scale but there's the idea that well it's not going to be controlled by a corporation so we have this like non-corporate large-scale automation and that's like what's somehow supposed to be empowering but of course if you actually are a person who's being shafted by an automated system that's not empowering at all right you know especially if you get like locked into it so a lot of there's a lot of pushback on this and i think it's the the vision of the sort of web 3 space is becoming a bit more interesting over time right um so working on a dow project right now uh maybe i'll tell you about it in a separate time okay about how we could kind of utilize the tools of like nfts and taos to kind of um support maybe areas of research into consciousness that um don't really get supported well and like the mainstream or the yeah a lot of the a lot of the nft worlds um you know there's a long history of people using speculative markets for trying to get out of poverty you know yeah and in some ways there's there's an element of the nfc world and i've brought a crypto token world which sort of uh replays this right i've come across a lot of groups who basically see these you know if you imagine the global economy is like you know those vast you know interdependent system there's probably like a five percent layer of it which is just like speculative capital just going around and at a large scale a tiny amount of speculative capital applied to us a limited supply of tokens can create like massive spikes in price right so this is why you know you throw out like an nft and you capture a tiny little element of that speculative capital flowing around you can have huge gains right and but of course that's extremely volatile it can collapse just as easily right so uh there's an interesting game being played in a lot of these crypto things where people are partially aware that they're they're relying upon these fickle speculative dynamics um but if you play it right you can potentially bootstrap something or like bring it into being so there's an interesting you know quite a sort of angsty thing going on especially a lot of artists in the nft space um yeah i mean but you know we're also interested in the idea of like you know a membership sort of community you know you know the nfts could allow you to set up like tiered communities uh yeah yeah yeah um i mean i i i would like to hear about that actually because i've also come across people trying to do these like token gated communities where you know you sort of can buy into um buy into them and that that creates a whole bunch of interesting social dynamics as well you know like um yeah i've seen some groups where they're like we're gonna create these like limited supply tokens which give you access to community and then as the community becomes more valuable the token price goes up yeah and then what happens of course is that if you're a poorer member of that community that's when you exit right because now like now you're like oh no my tokens skyrocketed okay back yeah no exactly but i mean um yes you have to think about safeguards to that you know because yeah i have that you know i i was given an artist gave me a token that when i he first gave it was worth like 1500 which you know was meaningful to me but i didn't feel i could sell it because he given it to me and then it plunged and now it's you know worthy like a tenth of that or something uh i think that's an interesting yeah there's a lot of interesting questions um yeah you want to make the value actually valuable for people um okay i had another what was my other question for you oh he's gonna ask you about stable coins uh i liked uh you actually helped me understand um i guess you you probably published the book before the collapse of like the tara luna ecosystem yeah yeah what what did you think of that what did that what did that reveal about crypto what's happening with tether i mean tether seems to be um you know you mentioned i mean i know brock pierce pretty well uh you know i mean you mentioned that it feels like a highly uh kind of uh unstable um kind of thing and yet it's still managed to pass muster with regulation and so on like uh yeah curious about your thoughts around around these ecosystems the first thing i'll say is that you know in the process of writing a book i wasn't able to follow every single breaking news thing about the the stable coin space and this is this is a problem about writing any anything about breaking tech is that you're it's immediately out of date right so actually in the book i don't try to like analyze the specifics of any particular project because it's sort of futile right they're constantly changing um so i don't actually know the latest on tether and the terra luna thing i didn't follow closely but the big the big point to make is that the first wave of stable coin systems were basically not that different to paypal right which is a third tier um in the book i look at the sort of the different tiers of the monetary system where you have the core player which is the sort of state and then the banking sector which just issues a second layer of money and then these tertiary players like paypal and actually there's many tertiary players even little like local currencies that are have backed by dollars or like a territory player like a very small stable coin in a way right so these stable coin players are basically issuing third tier promises for us dollars but doing it in a decentralized fashion of some sort and that was the original tether tether type of models they had to have bank accounts somewhere that would have um uh yeah money in them bank issued money and then that would be issuing these tokens people and you could move them around and that's creates a kind of like unregulated like black market in sort of dollar promises as it were right which is very interesting right because it's almost a sort of type of it was one of the closest we've seen to being like a type of digital cache in the sense that it had this like semi uh anonymity to it or sort of pseudonymity to it whilst being um actually tethered to the actual monetary system but then obviously what's the the obvious intuition that then comes out of the crypto community is like while those are very clearly dependent upon the banking system because they're in the end they're these like um tether has got bank accounts somewhere and so there's this whole bunch of like uh efforts to say can we sort of artificially synthesize some kind of unit which will look like the dollar but won't actually be attached to the dollar system so all the sort of second wave of stable coin systems like dye things like lunar and all stuff they're all even with stuff like olympus dow and stuff they're all basically trying to find different mechanisms to do like background trading and arbitrage with crypto assets in order to artificially replicate um a us dollar all right um which will remain stable and some of them have very unstable mechanisms to do that so they crash right and that was what happened with the lunar system and i can't go into the depths of that no i mean i had friends who were you know raving about it and i think one friend was telling me that you know if you stake you staked it and then staked it again and all these complicated staking mechanisms like 6500 x return or something was like insanity you know yeah yeah there was obviously a very there's a vibrant d5 type community who's he's nerding out in the stuff and they're like they're the ones like doing you know uh volunteering to be the ones who provide the black background collateral or whatever and i mean if you're a trader and i used to work in the trading world if you're a trader there's a very fascinating stuff you can do in this world right but in terms of the actual person and everyday economy um being dependent upon some algorithmic stablecoin right now is not a great idea right but the the ones that are aren't algorithmic the sort of first wave of all coins which are actually literally tethered into the banking system probably are quite stable right um at least in principle which ones are those well circle usd is the one usd use that's something i call that usdc tether was at least claims to be in that sort of vague category of things um yeah there's a bunch i don't know all the names them right now right but they're they're they literally will have a bank account somewhere which has uh money and they they will issue against that uh these tokens right and the stable coins are becoming an interesting political issue because um unlike you know ordinary us dollars in cash form you know let's say my family in zimbabwe if they want to use u. s dollars they historically had to use actual physical cash right which sort of limits the use of this this foreign currency in the context of zimbabwe but if you can just sign it to download an app and suddenly use a us dollar stable coin it doesn't require having a us dollar bank account right that suddenly becomes geopolitically interesting and also probably very dangerous and like problematic right because now zimbabwe's monetary society okay zimbabwe's largely lost his monetary sovereignty but let's imagine you're now in like a different country um um even in south africa where you know i grew up um you know if you're the south african government and you're like oh our citizens now have access to us dollar stable coins that they can potentially use now you this is increasingly essentially the us dollar hegemony right because in the end those table coin systems are plugging back into the u. s banking system right even if they are operating on a crypto architecture so there's a whole bunch of like geopolitical issues now that are emerging from that and we've now seen the rise of the cbdc debate which is around the central banks issuing digital currencies which is partly in response to that cool well listen this is really fascinating i think we've gone for a little over an hour-ish with a couple of glitchy pauses and um yeah people should definitely read your fascinating and exciting book cloud money but i'd love to uh you know maybe there's something i've missed that you would want to share if there's any big subject in the book that i've totally avoided um that you think people would be really fascinated by or anything people could do with all this information i guess would also be interesting you know as a finale yeah look i would say look i mean cloud money is is one uh instantiation of like a particular part of my thought but if you want to go into some of my like broader stuff around monetary systems my newsletter which is altered states of monetary consciousness is looks at a lot of broader issues around money and helps you know tries to i'm often trying to figure out interesting ways to sort of illuminate aspects of these kind of monetary meditations as it were um so going forward i'm quite interested to do a lot more sort of proactive stuff on you know how would you build different monetary systems and um so that's going to be something for the future but one of the things i i guess i which is part of what's driven me in the book is quite a basic impulse which is you know i'm a physical being and uh i think there's something interesting about the cash system where uh you know we're constantly told that we should be wanting these super you know like sort of dematerialized um hyper fast digital systems but there's actually something in the nature of like human beings where we love texture we love touch we love localization we really respond best to our immediate environments right and i don't want to sort of over emphasize the beautiful texture of this stuff oh my god it's so you know it's so glamorous i'm you know like with these horrible green green dots yeah yeah so i think you find different types of people as a person i'm really into physicality but i think there are types of people who really i love this class coated with strange illuminati symbols such as eyes over pyramids and so on yeah yeah look look um i guess this this is a broader point about analog systems right because i think there's an interesting thing going on in our economic system where we're constantly told that we should be these transnational hyper beings but in reality we're not right so there's an interesting dynamic going on in our debates about the cash system where and i'm not again i don't want to romanticize cash because at one point cash is how you extended the power of capital systems i don't want to like say this is some kind of like innocent type of system or something right but in the current phase of global capitalism there's something like interesting going on where we're increasingly told we should be disconnecting from our bodies and i think there's there's like a little kernel of this cash debate which sort of like is asking us is to think about that the level of the monetary system do you know what the uh classical mayans used as a currency promises no cacao beans ah and promises no cacao beans as their was their currency which is beautiful because like how do you become wealthier yeah you plant a chocolate tree and you grow more yeah yeah and it's you know good for everybody yeah so i think that's the last thing i'll say is there's something physicality and uh slowness is um i think something to be reclaimed rather than to be uh shunned yeah cool man i love the book and really happy you're thinking these good thoughts uh i'll recommend your sub stack if you recommend mine we'll get some trading and uh let's stay in touch about this i'm a little i'm a little bit behind on reading all of your your output you've been putting a lot of stuff out i've been having fun with it i just suddenly realized that um i could write about whatever i wanted and some people yeah it's kind of until so why not yeah man's in a bit of a bit of a hiatus while i'm promoting the book but it'll be it'll get back into action in the next few months yeah cool cool cool let's stay in touch and um yeah you know i'll introduce you to this whole dow project that we're working on i think he'll dig it and um yeah i think it's i like your idea of going proactive in terms of trying to figure out what what can be built uh that's of value um yeah for sure and how we exchange value i guess uh all right have a great day uh enjoy berlin uh super hot channel go to bergheim for me and again please and i'll talk to you soon cool daniel bye-bye
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.