Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
They do solve problems though. If there was a simple app that musicians could sell tickets direct to customers, you can loose all the predatory middlemen
You don’t need NFTs for that app. You can just make it with a frontend attached to a database and a payment system.
Venues are contractually tied to TicketMaster and the like. You can’t solve that with NFTs.
You don’t need it because we have ticketmaster? That’s your argument lol? It’s to prevent the next one.
It won’t work because contracts. Try to read next time.
They only got those contracts because there was no alternative. Try to infer using your common sense next time. Lots of cities had contracts with taxi companies before uber. And some on chain app will eventually remove the remaining parasitic component.
If they went looking for alternatives, it would be another service like TicketMaster. There is no benefit to NFTs here. Try using common sense to think about what NFTs actually solve in this situation. The answer is nothing at all.
The parasitic middleman.
To be replaced by another middleman.
All NFTs are doing here is replacing the database where it says you have a ticket. You still need an interface for choosing your ticket and getting payment. Venues are not going to hire a programming team to create that in-house. They’re going to outsource that to someone. Might not be TicketMaster, but someone. You might as well keep the database centralized.
The best we can hope for here is to have several competing services. NFTs do nothing to help that.
They won’t need to build anything there will eventually be mature open source tooling that smaller artists and venues will start using, it’ll gain mindshare and become the standard. Or you can wait for ticketmaster to be included into a cbdc coming to a country near you soon. Going on the on-chain either way but it’d rather we took back control.