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The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Forerunners: Ideas First) Paperback – September 26, 2016

by David Golumbia (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 151 ratings
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Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
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  1. Part of series
    Forerunners: Ideas First
  2. Print length
    100 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Univ Of Minnesota Press
  5. Publication date
    September 26, 2016
  6. Dimensions
    5 x 0.7 x 7 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    1517901804
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1517901806
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Golumbia, in his small but important way, is helping wake us to the falsity of our perceived neutrality."—One Flew East

"This book is a very readable and valuable monograph which combines sound historical research with insightful analysis. All concerned citizens should read this book, which is an essential resource for understanding the true stakes of current technological hyperbole."—Newsclick

"Golumbia a le mérite de s’attaquer à des idées qui ne sont pas suffisamment remises en question dans les communautés de la cryptomonnaie et des technologies de chaînes concertées. J’en recommande fortement la lecture à quiconque s’interroge sur les impacts de ces technologies sur nos sociétés."—D’un bloc à l’autre

About the Author


 

David Golumbia (1963–2023) taught in the English Department and the Media, Art, and Text PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was the author of The Cultural Logic of Computation and many articles on digital culture, language, and literary studies and theory.


Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1st edition (September 26, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 100 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1517901804
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1517901806
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.7 x 7 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 151 ratings

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David Golumbia

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4 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

Bob Morris
5.0 out of 5 stars A concise explanation of the extreme right-wing ideology of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2017
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Bitcoin was birthed in and is influenced by extremist right-wing libertarian ideology. You are no doubt familiar with their rants. We must protect ourselves from the dammed gummint who wants to take our money and, oh yeah, the Federal Reserve prints money, which causes inflation, and is doing this for nefarious reasons, probably to control us and of course, take our money.

No matter that none of this makes actual economic sense, and that such crackpot ideologies are dismissed by actual economists. Right-wing libertarians appear primarily anguished by the thought that a) they have to pay taxes and b) that someone else might gain benefit for their tax money. That they themselves are helped by tax money others have paid never occurs to them.

So then, their goal is to hide as much money as possible from the government, and even if doing so might constitute tax evasion and money laundering, that would be a-ok because they are doing it for a noble cause and the rules don't apply to them anyway.

Bitcoin is a perfect platform for this. However bitcoin proponents end up being incoherent. They claim paper money printed by governments is unstable and bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) will replace it. Except the price of bitcoin skitters wildly all over the place, so it's not stable at all. Plus, a few can and do manipulate the price. Thefts and ripoffs are common, and it doesn't scale. There's no way bitcoin - which can do a whopping seven transactions a second now maximum - will ever replace actual currencies.

At heart, bitcoin is about eliminating governments and replacing them with a deranged unworkable fantasy of an ungoverned global marketplace with no rules and no regulations, in which everyone is somehow supposed to be free. It's rubbish. A few on the top, the miners, will control it, and it won't be decentralized at all.

David Golumbia parses all of this in great detail in "The Politics of Bitcoin," explaining how and why bitcoin emerged from John Bircher nutcase ideology and still owes much to that, and why this should make the rest of us uneasy.
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Will Szal
4.0 out of 5 stars Does Blockchain Care It Is Right Wing?
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2019
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I came across this book by the recommendation of the author Daniel Pinchbeck. Published in the “Forerunners: Ideas First” series of short books from the University of Minnesota Press, it’s exceedingly approachable—well shy of 100 pages. In blockchain-time, one might consider it archaic, coming from the generation of yore: 2016—although it remains as cogent and timely as ever. David Golumbia is a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University, and text comes across as academic in nature, with countless citations.

Before diving into the meat of the subject, I offer the caveat that both the book, and this review, focus primarily on the Bitcoin community, and less so on the blockchain space in general. As the dominant incumbent and original blockchain pioneer, Bitcoin is understandably more conservative than many of the newer blockchain upstarts, to which I don’t give attention in this missive.

As the subtitle broadcasts, the thesis of the book is that Bitcoin is an instrument of right-wing extremism. Having been a participant in the blockchain space for the past year-and-a-half, it comes as no surprise to me that academics find the movement generally right-wing. The cypherpunk movement that birthed the blockchain community is firmly libertarian.
The last two sentences of the book aptly sum up Golumbia’s arguments:

"Recent events have shown repeatedly that we discount the power of engineers and/or ideologies to realize their political visions through software design at our peril. What is required to combat that power is not more wars between algorithmic platforms and individuals who see themselves as above politics, but a reassertion of the political power that the blockchain is specifically constructed to dismantle." (Page 76)

The relationship between money, markets, and the state are at the heart of Golumbia’s explorations. Does government enhance or curtail freedom? Whereas the left would suggest the former, the right sides with the latter.

"The cyberlibertarian belief that ‘governments should not regulate the internet’ really makes sense only if it is true that government exists to curtail rather than to promote human freedom. Yet in most non-rightist political theory, government exists in no small part to promote human freedom.” (page 6)

Golumbia supports this argument that the blockchain community is dominated by right-wing discourse with ample evidence. He then moves on to an exploration of inflation and store of value. During my entire time in the blockchain space, I’ve repeatedly needed to remind people that inflation is defined by prices. Milton Friedman’s unrealistic claims that inflation is driven by supply are rife throughout the space, and Golumbia’s research helps put my daily experience into a larger political perspective.

“From the farthest reaches of the explicit anarcho-capitalist fringe…to the supposedly responsible mainstream, we find the same insistence on the monetary nature of inflation and the concomitant immunity of Bitcoin to inflation due to its limited total supply.” (page 19)

Neither economic history, nor Bitcoin’s extreme volatility, support such claims. Bitcoin has gone through regular and periodic cycles of 5x inflation (hyperinflation). Limited supply does not guarantee high prices.

On this thread, beyond a few asides about the concentration of Bitcoin holdings, Golumbia fails to explore the effects of constrained-supply on wealth inequality. When token architectures can only raise funds for their capitalization via regressive and severely limited token supplies that offer the chance of 10x, 100x, or 1000x returns for initial investors or participants, the demographic results are that Crypto Valley makes Silicon Valley look like an egalitarian utopia. It almost goes without saying that extreme wealth inequality is generally associated with right-wing sympathies.

This brings us to the conspiracy theories surrounding the Federal Reserve, and monetary cosmology.

“Bitcoin is obviously built to escape the kind of regulation the Federal Reserve exerts over…’money supply regulation’…, yet this is frequently taken to mean that it somehow inherently escapes…’legal regulation.’” (pages 37-38)

Golumbia dissects the intermingled meanings of the term “regulation.” On the one hand, it relates to value, and on the other, legality. Golumbia is right to assert that the space often conflates the two. This likely ties back to the revolutionary outlook of many crypto enthusiasts; they’re as concerned about the Fed influencing value as they are about the SEC regulating issuance.

One of the recurrent conversations in the space regards the role of the state, not only with regard to cryptocurrency regulation, but more broadly. I regularly hear questions like, “are we headed for a state-less future?” My assumption is, no, we’re not. But opinions, aside Golumbia raises an important part about the definition of money. Many crypto enthusiasts regularly refer to and aspire to have Bitcoin and other tokens treated as “money.” And yet, according to Modern Monetary Theory, money is defined by its issuance by a sovereign government.

“Nation-state sovereignty and the very idea of money are inextricably linked in our world, and so the notion of money that is not issued by a nation-state is essentially a contradiction.” (page 54)

In other words, cryptocurrency could be money or could be decentralized, but not both. In some ways, this is a semantic conversation, but it gets to some of the heart of blockchain ethics and political theory—are decentralization and democracy compatible? And when I say democracy, I’m not referring to the deeply compromised situation we currently find ourselves in here in the US, but in the aspirational sense of the word used by David Graeber (in his book, “The Democracy Project,”) and Astra Taylor (in her documentary, “What is Democracy?").

And this brings us around to Golumbia’s concluding thoughts regarding politics and technology, and their tenuous relationship:

“Bitcoin and the blockchain do a remarkable job of reinforcing the view that the entire global history of political thought and action…has already been jettisoned through the introduction of any number of digital technologies.” (page 74)
“It is hard to see how this [non-right] minority can resist the political values that are very literally coded into the software itself.” (page 75)

The CEO at my blockchain startup, Gregory Landua, recently read Anand Giridharadas’ “Winner Take All,” and commented that it brought the necessity of government into the forefront for him. Corporate tyranny is already beginning to overpower government tyranny, and, however much we might despise the fact, the state continues to be the best instrument we have to mitigate the abuses of power rife within our current global corporatocracy.

Although Gulmbia has deftly performed the task of convincing us of his assertion that the blockchain space is dominated by right-wing rhetoric, he leaves it up to us to determine the more important question: do we care? I can attest from personal experience that many members of the blockchain community are deeply disenchanted with the both the content and tone of political discourse on both the right and the left. Without noticing, does that de facto mean we’re inheriting the conservative biases of our forefathers in economically liberal communities? Within a community so set on transforming the world, can we afford such naïvete? These are the questions Golumbia leaves us with, and questions that merit significant cogitation.
46 people found this helpful
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J. M. Korhonen
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and timely critical essay of a potentially powerful technology
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2017
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As an essay, I would have rated this a four-star one, but the timeliness of the topic and the dearth of critical overviews of Bitcoin, blockchain and the ideologies behind them make this indispensable reading for anyone interested and concerned about the direction technology, and technologists, are taking us.

The boom does a fine job exposing the peculiarities and contradictions behind the Bitcoin, and shows again how currecies are to some extent ideological projects. In this case, the ideologues are the extreme right wing libertarians and anarchocapitalists who see the democratic society as oppressive one but pay lip service, at best, even to the possibility of misdemeanours of wealthy individuals and corporations. As a researcher studying the social implications of blockchain technologies, these tendencies have been impossible to miss, and I applaud the author for making such a persuasive case in such a short treatise.
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Lisa Hoyle
5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2022
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This tiny book blew my mind. It coherently destroys the myth around crypto currency, 'freedom' and its impartiality. This analysis will be cited in years to come and will become a classic, guaranteed. Has changed the way I think about digital currencies forever.
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Mark E. Jeftovic
1.0 out of 5 stars An abundance of logical fallacies and factual errors
Reviewed in Canada on January 13, 2018
Verified Purchase
Far-right extremism is a political ideology that incorporates neo-Naziism, fascism, xenophobia and racism - ideals which Golumbia asserts in this book are "very literally coded into the [Bitcoin] software itself".

However, the entire book is filled with logical fallacies where the author arbitrarily declares any criticism of central banking or the current monetary system, or any diverging opinion from his deeply misinformed take on "conventional economics" to be, by definition "right wing extremism", "conspiracy theory" or both. He then tangentially connects these numerous fallacious inferences to Bitcoin. (In a 62-page book the phrase “right-wing” occurs 78 times, “extremism” and “extremist” occur 32 and 21 times respectively).

The book contains several, significant factual errors: example Golumbia attempts to demonstrate how use of Bitcoin facilitates criminality by citing it's use in making donations to Wikileaks during the 2010 blockade of their payment providers. Golumbia states rather categorically that "it is a violation of U.S law" to donate to Wikileaks and that is totally and utterly false.

He attempts to debunk the generally observed phenomenon of inflation and it's erosion of purchasing power as "conspiracy theory", by claiming currency units can retain their purchasing power via investment returns - completely confusing nominal returns on assets with purchasing power of currency units.

While the author decries prominent Bitcoin authors such as Andreas Antonopoulos "Mastering Bitcoin" book "includes several substantial economic discussions in which extremist views are proffered, without attribution, as if they are simply commonsense analyses of relatively uncontroversial subjects" - his own book, this one, does exactly this nearly it's entire length.

The book concludes rather abruptly, reiterating that right-wing extremism is coded "very literally into the software" of Bitcoin itself, yet nowhere in the book has Golumbia actually demonstrated any of his claims.

I find this book troubling on two fronts: 1) it was never fact checked, nor I suspect reviewed by anybody with a semblance of economic literacy; and 2) the author is an associate professor at a university. Yikes.
5 people found this helpful
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SupportYourLocalBookstore
5.0 out of 5 stars Spannende Kritik der ideologischen Grundlagen von Kryptowährungen
Reviewed in Germany on December 30, 2017
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Beim derzeitigen Hype um Bitcoins und ihre immense Wertsteigerung gerät schnell aus dem Blick, welche ideologischen Hintergründe eigentlich zur Entwicklung der Kryptowährung geführt haben. David Golumbias schmales Bändchen schafft da Abhilfe und führt gekonnt in einen Konnex aus libertärer Antistaatlichkeit und Verschörungstheorien ein. Der interne Diskurs um Bitcoin – so Golumbias Darstellung – lebt von einer Skepsis gegenüber staatlichen Eingriffen in die Zirkulationssphäre. Diese Skepsis scheint auf groben Missverständnissen staatlicher Finanzpolitik zu beruhen, welche nahelegen, der Staat wäre daran interessiert, die Bürgerinnen und Bürger um die Früchte ihrer Arbeit zu bringen, indem ihr Geld entwertet würde. Bitcoin tritt nun einerseits als der Versuch einer Gegenwährung auf und andererseits als rentables Anlageobjekt. Mit Kursen derzeit um die vierzehntausend Euro disqualifiziere sich, so Golumbia, Bitcoin jedoch selbst als Währung, auch wenn seine ideologischen Verfechter weiter an diesem Status festhalten.
Das Buch ist sehr lehrreich, auch für Leserinnen und Leser, die ökonomietheoretisch nicht besonders bewandert sind und Bitcoin nur vom Hörensagen kennen (so wie der Autor dieser Rezension).
2 people found this helpful
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Amazon Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Stichhaltige Analyse
Reviewed in Germany on October 13, 2021
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Das Buch ist für die betroffene Zielgruppe zwar sicherlich ungeeignet, da es für ein Fachpublikum geschrieben ist und weniger niedrigschwellig formuliert ist, aber die Quintessenz ist absolut richtig. Gute, wissenschaftliche Arbeit, aber kein "Produkt für die Massen", da es einige Hürden in sich birgt.
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Tyler
1.0 out of 5 stars One Star
Reviewed in Canada on July 2, 2017
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One of the most bias things I have ever read
4 people found this helpful
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