Is Bitcoin the Perfect Storm of White Male Privilege and Technology?
In the fall of 2011, I lived in one of the Berkeley student co-op houses, a quintessential, idealistic, and imperfect community that operated as part of the largest housing cooperative in the United States. One night, a housemate and I baked vegan cookies to bring to the Occupy protesters who had pitched tents in Berkeley’s famous Sproul Plaza. The Oakland Occupy group had been dispersed by police from Frank H. Ogawa Plaza and reconvened on Cal’s campus with a mixture of students and locals.
I’m not sure if I was drawn there more by the images of Occupy Wall Street I’d been seeing on the news or if after four years at Berkeley it just became second nature to head to campus during protests. After dispersing the cookies, we hung around and talked. Someone blew bubbles. I saw friends and acquaintances from my past lives at Cal: old roommates, old classes, old hookups. Other days, the protest was not so peaceful, but this day felt like that season finale where they find a way to have all the cast members show up in the same place, even if it’s a little forced.
The goals of the Occupy movement initially centered around combating corruption in Wall Street and grew to include demands for equity in education and campaign finance reform. People hoped for major changes to our financial institutions — more oversight, regulation, and diversity.
As I’ve read about cryptocurrency, and its proponents’ lofty and utopian vision of building a new financial structure, a separate economy with complete freedom — I thought about the Occupy movement. It’s common for society and politics to have a cyclical pattern, and just as Trump’s election signaled the swinging of the political pendulum towards authoritarianism, our economic imaginations have swung from taking pitchforks to the 1% and landed in the cradle of a libertarian cryptocurrency.
Heralded for a deregulated setup and relative anonymity, Bitcoin users operate in a distinct economy that’s not under the thumb of government, banks, and credit card companies — a digital frontier often compared to the Wild West. Much like the Wild West, investors are romanticized as heroic adventurers, and selfishness and greed are viewed as an admirable quest for self-reliance. The get-rich-quick possibility in Bitcoin is the shiny digital progeny of the American dream.
However, there is a dark truth underneath the glowing numbers on the screen: the value of Bitcoin rests on its ability to support illegal activity. A study from University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney showed that nearly half of all bitcoin transactions involved an illegal activity. With Bitcoin, you can “order acid attacks, rape, and murder” and “buy drugs, passports, cloned credit cards, and counterfeit money.“
Despite Bitcoin’s clear-cut use for illegal drug and weapons trading and the particular ease with which it facilitates human trafficking, most coverage and analysis of the currency focuses on the technological innovation and the financial visionaries it attracts. Though there are striking similarities between the Bitcoin business and the business of cartels and gangs, there is one major difference: Bitcoin is mostly used by young, white men. This disparity recalls the hypocrisy in marijuana legalization where the difference in opinion of who constitutes a criminal and who constitutes an investor rests firmly in class and race.
Bitcoin’s image as an innovative tech enterprise instead leads media coverage to many of the same places as the Silicon Valley coverage, casting the primarily white, male users as global innovators, despite their lack of investment in supporting the common good or a diverse society.
This is similar to the way we see diversity issues handled in tech. There is an outcry that so few women and minorities are in the tech field. The issue gains coverage or “visibility.” Organizations pop up to teach children to code and mentor college students, all asking the question, “how can we get more minority groups into tech?” But then what? You’ll never get the right answer if you’re asking the wrong question. Staffing tech companies with a diverse workforce isn’t a cure-all for the larger issues in the tech industry boom, including a widening class inequality and massive gentrification in major cities. But the myth of the American dream is strong and sustains the idea that if more individual minorities can become self-made standouts, their success will trickle down to their communities.
Bitcoin has taken on this narrative of participation as well, with female Bitcoin advocates claiming that in order to continue and succeed, Bitcoin needs women. But more women in the field doesn’t make the field feminist.
As “feminism” and “social progress” are redefined by corporations and the individual accomplishments of their minority employees, the arena and the outcome of those accomplishments become irrelevant in the public eye. In the age of Shark Tank, giving women more entrepreneurial opportunities appears to be a bigger coup for women’s rights than systemic policy changes. We’ve settled on a neatly packaged feminist progressive brand which fits seamlessly into our hyper-capitalistic, male-dominated society. It’s no wonder then, that Bitcoin’s freedom narrative fits our individualistic capitalist society so well. As the perfect storm of technology, capitalism, and the American ideal of rugged individualism, Bitcoin’s rise makes all too much sense.
As I consider Bitcoin against my campy version of activism that night at Berkeley, I think about the overlapping narratives of the two groups. When the police and the administration succeeded in removing all the tents from the campus, students filled tents with helium balloons and floated them above Sproul Plaza. It was funny, cheeky, and glorious. However, it was also a sad reminder that our movement was not welcome there, a movement whose goal was to challenge a corrupt financial system and call for better regulation. We were being physically removed from our own campus space even though our actions were not harming anyone. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is allowed to operate above the law, above financial regulations, and often to engage in illicit activities that harm many. So here we find ourselves moving backwards, where innovation is heralded so long as we’ve got a man at the helm. Once again, we’re all far too comfortable with valorizing an ethically and legally dubious system as long as it bolsters the same group already at the top of society.
So where do we go from here? We can start with recognizing that our unquestioning faith in technology needs to be tempered with an assessment of the potential harm and consequences, and that it can contribute to the already growing divide of income disparity. We can also utilize more innovative practices to integrate women and minorities into industries that are still dominated by white men, and we can do so in a way that promotes diversity beyond percentages, beyond the binary 0’s and 1’s, and beyond Bitcoin.
Ana Cottle is a freelance writer, editor, and translator in Southern California. She is also an editor at www.policy-shift.com.
