The Last Currency: On Crypto and the Banality of Extinction
To consolidate present and future power, right-wing libertarians and their Trumpist allies depend on two things: the dismantling of the administrative state on one hand and a near-extinction event on the other. Cryptocurrency offers them just that — a critical bridge for a coup not just over what remains of the state, but over the future itself, or more precisely, its ruins. The text that follows, adapted from my book “Climate Propagandas,” charts how crypto became a cornerstone of this libertarian project: a speculative economy, a political weapon, and a mechanism of planetary extraction disguised as innovation.
The emergence of cryptocurrency is a key right-wing libertarian building block to turn their visions of Martian colonies and floating cities for the super-rich into a reality. Major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been joined by thousands of cryptocurrencies, which at a peak in 2021 totaled an estimated value of more than 3 trillion dollars before facing a major downfall following the high-profile collapse of the FTX international exchange for crypto assets.
Today, self-declared “crypto president” Trump, who launched his own $TRUMP meme coin three days before the inauguration of his second regime, is actively building a national stockpile of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. His family has personally profited at least 1 billion dollars from their crypto schemes so far.
Cryptocurrency runs on blockchain technology — designed by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, who might be either an individual or a group — and is a stateless virtual currency that can operate without control by governments or banks, though established financial institutions are doing their best to capitalize on the market. It’s the libertarian dream, following their adulation of (neo)liberal economist Friedrich von Hayek, whose book “The Denationalization of Money” (1976) relished the possibility of a future in which regulatory democracy would be removed entirely from the production, distribution, and management of capital.
It is not surprising that libertarian propagandists are leading supporters of the cryptocurrency market. Elon Musk’s companies held $1.5 billion in Bitcoin before becoming a core supporter of the “Dogecoin,” a cryptocurrency that started as a mockery of Bitcoin using the famous “Doge” meme consisting of a Shiba Inu dog with its eyes wide open, onto which users would place the dog’s supposed misspelled internal monologue. After Musk declared himself the “Dogefather,” announcing that Tesla products could now be purchased with Dogecoin, the value of the coin rose by 50 percent, before plummeting in the subsequent crisis.
Today, Musk’s branding exercise has expanded into his very own government organization: Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE” in short, that is formally tasked with identifying government inefficiency, but in reality aims to dismantle the administrative state altogether. The aim of DOGE, the agency, and Dogecoin, the currency, at the core is the same: the complete replacement of existing political and financial institutions and entities, in order for a new private corporate order to take charge, removing any democratic checks and balances along the way. For libertarians, cryptocurrency and the ideal of decentralized finance, or “DeFi,” represents a path away from government regulation and power to destabilize existing financial institutions by creating parallel economies in support of their own world-making efforts.
Cryptocurrencies consist of digital tokens that can be used as a means of transaction by being sent electronically from one user to another, wherever digital connections can be established. The blockchain is essentially a record of transactions, meaning that each block of the blockchain consists of a unique data transaction fingerprint linked with all other blocks, allowing users to keep an overview of all transactions taking place across the network. Having no centralized authority, trust in the blockchain is in the encryption of its chain. Rather than trusting a government or bank, one trusts complex math. Cryptocurrency’s value is created by a process called “mining.” Bitcoin users, for example, can mine their own coins that are inscribed into the blockchain, by letting their computers solve complex mathematical problems — something that requires vast amounts of energy that emit huge amounts of pollution. The value of Bitcoin thus equals the amount of energy and computing power needed to create it, combined with the willingness of people to embrace the currency as their own as well as investors feeling incentivized to turn their assets into crypto. Like anything digital, these currencies are in fact produced through material means.
While cryptocurrency may be the last currency, artificial intelligence promises to be the last intelligence.
Taxing cryptocurrencies has proven notoriously difficult, and some countries, like Bermuda, Malta, Gibraltar, and Liechtenstein, have created havens for crypto holders and companies. And while blockchain’s decentralized technology holds some potentially transformative promise when it comes to rethinking voting processes and self-organized micro-energy grid management, it currently favors those with the means to purchase digital currency, or to perform the mining itself: The more computational power one can mount, the more cryptocurrency one can mine. That means that rather than a central bank, “central miners” can disproportionately impact the number of coins circulating and the value they hold on the (crypto)market. No surprise, then, that Thiel’s Seasteading Institute announced its short-lived “Crypto Cruise Ship” in 2020, named the ms Satoshi, in honor of the blockchain founder.
Thinking about the rise of cryptocurrency as the “last currency” is more than metaphor considering its devastating environmental footprint. At its current rate, environmental damages through mining are calculated to potentially produce enough emissions to warm the planet above the apocalyptic two degrees Celsius in a mere 22 years. Parts of crypto mining have moved into the sphere of so-called renewables and carbon offset schemes, particularly in the art world, where various figures and institutions have begun to partake in generating cryptovalue in the form of so-called nonfungible tokens (NFTs), unique digital ledgers stored on the blockchain that can consist of a digital image or video.
Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, or “beeple,” saw his digital NFT artwork “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” (2021) sell for $67 million at Christie’s auction house. The work consists of a collage of the daily digital paintings the artist published on his website, which read like the dark underbelly of X (formerly Twitter) misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Winkelmann is obsessed with weight shaming, the supposed sexual perversions of political and religious leaders, and the portrayal of aggressive racialized sexual stereotypes. Staggering sums are paid for energy-killing crypto paraphernalia that glorify an incel-induced culture of racial and gender violence. As such, extinction as currency embodies a clear banality of evil: the banality of extinction.
The ultimate cynicism might be on display when the United Nations presented an NFT art show highlighting the issue of climate change titled “DigitalArt4 Climate” at the cop26 Climate Change Conference in Scotland in 2021 — embracing the very technology that shamelessly accelerates the ecological crisis the summit is ostensibly mean to combat. For even if NFTs could be produced through renewable energy, this does not undo the fact that “sustainable” energy infrastructures are themselves reliant on vast mineral extraction and industrial production. As long as the myths of endless progress and consumer culture are not dismantled, increasingly energy-hungry digital economies will consume renewable resources away from primary common needs.
Such extreme energy extraction investment opportunities are already widely available, the booming field of so-called artificial intelligence first and foremost. It is of course deeply cynical to be willing to ascribe “intelligence” to algorithms, but not to, say, pigs or flowers. The choice to do so is because AI is considered a replication of “our” intelligence — with an aggressive bias toward digitized archives dominated by white men, a global minority whose perspectives have disproportionately influenced recorded history over the past centuries. The ultimate expression of human supremacy over nature is our supposed capability to extrapolate our own intelligence into servitude, to extract our thought-world as capital, the way protagonists in Brandon Cronenberg’s film “Infinity Pool” (2023) reproduce themselves for execution-entertainment, never entirely knowing whether it is themselves or their copies who are being killed. But while the costs in Cronenberg’s film are murderous, the cost of AI markets is omnicidal, as they rely on stupendous amounts of energy for computing power, which are projected to be greater than the entire human workforce by 2025, and its global energy consumption to reach 3.5 percent of the world’s total by 2030. While cryptocurrency may be the last currency, artificial intelligence promises to be the last intelligence.
Considering the libertarian climate propaganda extinction loop (wherein a false solution to a crisis becomes justification for deepening the crisis itself), there is no contradiction in ruining living worlds by building a predatory energy economy, as this is the point: right wing libertarian propagation accelerates ungovernability to engineer its own worlds in the old system’s place.
Jonas Staal is a visual artist and propaganda researcher whose publications include “Propaganda Art in the 21st Century” and “Climate Propagandas,” from which this article is excerpted.
