Computer Artists
On Chaplin, Psychopolitics, and the Nihilism of Crypto Art
It is not easy to make a living as an artist. Anyone who has faced backlash from a potential client over what is almost always a reasonable asking price for a commission can attest to this fact. This is especially true in the case of digital artists. Unlike with tangible, physical art, the process of getting paid as a digital artist is abstracted and virtualized. They exist in a position of precarity that hasn’t shown many signs of stabilizing over the years.
In a certain sense, the rise of NFT’s and the crypto art market seemed initially to be a revelatory new platform of exchange for digital artists; one that seemed to have the potential to finally stabilize this precarity. This sleight-of-hand transformation of digital art pieces into identifiable pieces of code on the blockchain offered digital artists a way to distinguish between an “original” work and the millions of other copies of it that are floating around the internet. These digital works, in their upload to the blockchain through a process called minting, suddenly became unique commodities that could be sold for staggeringly high prices.
However, this unchecked optimism was dampened when digital artist Memo Akten published his now widely cited analysis of the unhinged ecological cost of crypto art, as well as its accompanying website; cryptoart.wtf. The figures he presented were a daunting indictment of NFT emissions that provided necessary context to this supposedly revolutionary new medium.
The discourse surrounding crypto art over the last few months has been enough to make anyone’s head spin. Oh, you’re against crypto art? Please, explain to me why you hate digital artists. Oh, you want to make a living minting your digital art as an NFT? Please, explain to me why you hate the environment.
While it is true that the NFT art marketplace has helped improve the material conditions of a few select entrepreneurial digital artists, this fact cannot be allowed to distract from the more sinister aspects of a system that destroys both the environment and the collective political imagination.
In light of this, many digital artists have also come forward to stress the need for a radical reconfiguration of crypto’s extractive technology, explicitly detailed in Toward a New Ecology of Crypto Art: A Hybrid Manifesto published on Flash-Art. The artists and theorists featured in this manifesto each offer varying perspectives on the past and future of crypto art, but there is a critique shared by each of the manifesto’s contributors; the destructive ecological costs of crypto art outweigh the material improvements it allows for a select few digital artists.
Despite this fact, in the wake of Akten publishing his findings, major publications from i-D to NPR have continued to publish writings that praise improvements the crypto art marketplace has had on the lives of digital artists, with the environmental impact being essentially relegated to a footnote in both of the aforementioned pieces. While they may provide a cursory acknowledgment of the ecological costs; the focus remains on improvements it has made for the lives of individual digital artists.
Although there is cursory admission of the NFT market’s enormous carbon footprint, this is not what we are told to pay attention to by the media, the individual artists, and the crypto investors. The ecological destruction caused by the crypto art market is perpetually sidelined, and the positive, additive effects it has on individual digital artists is emphasized.
This focus on growth and positivity, the constant emphasis on democratization and decentralization, is illustrative of a specific type of psychopolitical coercion that underpins the entire idea of crypto art culture. As German contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han notes in his brilliant book Psychopolitics:
“Today’s society of information is not characterized by destroying worlds, but multiplying them without end” (37).
The crypto art boom, framed as a ‘revolution’ by those who stand to profit from it, illustrates frightening trends in the transformations within neoliberal power; on both a material and psychological level.
I. Clown Machines
Framing the idea of hyper-individualized activity executed through computer technology as a revolutionary social good is nothing new. In fact, it is a central aspect of psychological coercion in neoliberal society.
In the mid-1980s, when anxiety and suspicion about the power of computers were relatively ubiquitous, the major personal computing companies pulled a similar stunt to assuage this entirely justifiable paranoia. Commercials such as Apple’s famous Ridley Scott-directed 1984 Superbowl advertisement illustrate this project on full display.
The sledgehammer-wielding heroine depicted in the commercial serves as the representation of the confident neoliberal subject, who prevents the onset of a totalitarian society by channeling her individuality into these new technologies which she refuses to be subjugated by.
To combat the centralized, homogenous power of those who control technology and information, taking the technology into one’s own individual hands is a truly revolutionary course of action. At least, according to Apple. But as Byun-Chul Han notes in Psychopolitics;
“Despite Apple’s message, 1984 did not signal the end of the surveillance state so much as the inception of a new kind of control society” (76).
There is no more explicit example of this shift towards psychological coercion than a series of relatively lesser-known commercials run by IBM around the same time.
The company, motivated by the same desire to normalize its technology in the eyes of the public that Apple was, needed to graft a humanizing face onto its product. To achieve this, hired an advertising agency that subsequently purchased the rights to Charlie Chaplin’s famous Tramp character from his family estate. The company then proceeded to run a series of commercials that depicted Chaplin’s Tramp using IBM computers as a tool to provide a sense of order to his slapstick existence.
The message of both advertisements is extremely explicit; if you’re a truly independent individual, you will actualize and optimize yourself through the machinery which is made available to you by those in power. You’re free to express yourself in any way you want, so long as you do it on an Apple or IBM computer.
But on another level, the relationship these specific IBM advertisements have to their source material is illustrative of certain patterns of neoliberal psychopolitics; which themselves can help develop an understanding of how to recognize and resist these tactics of coercive control as they apply to daily life. These commercials inherently serve to humanize and soften the public perception of IBM. But additionally, they serve the purpose of illustrating how the idea of the revolutionary power of individual expression can be gestured at while sanitizing it of all genuine historical context. The commercials necessarily disguise the fact that, in both a textual and metatextual sense, Chaplin’s art illustrated a wariness to the endless forward march of industrial progress that attracted a wide range of avant-garde artists to his work.
Considering this aspect of Chaplin’s body of work in juxtaposition with the IBM Tramp marketing campaign can help create a basic cultural framework for formulating a critique of the shifting psychological technologies of coercion within neoliberal capitalism, and illustrate how mutations of those same technologies of power are applied in contemporary society.
II. Chaplin & Conceptual Surplus
Chaplin’s Tramp is undeniably a character of surplus. Across the majority of his body of work, Chaplin offered witty re-interpretations of life under industrial modernity that highlight the gross inequities of the time. The Tramp never stops reinterpreting the subjective meaning of objects, and this formula can be applied to any circumstance or situation.
His formula served as a reaction to material changes in the production and consumption of art under industrial capitalism, which attributes value to art based on its potential for reciprocity and re-interpretation. Chaplin’s conceptual surplus provided this reciprocity since his reconfiguration of the everyday objects of modernity can be applied to any circumstance and repeated again and again.
The fact Chaplin’s Tramp character was praised by the avant-garde and dadaist art movements of the time illustrates how this conceptual surplus could serve as a satirical refutation of the new demands of industrial modernity. The dadaists and later the American avant-garde understood this shift towards consumerism within the valuation of art and provided a response to it that highlighted and satirized this need for reciprocity. From Duchamp's ready-mades to Warhol’s soup cans later down the line, these avant-garde movements offered an ironic response to the creation, consumption, and capitalization of art in the age of mass production: By subjectively reconfiguring the context of an object, these artists legislated its artistic worth.
Chaplin’s entire artistic formula involved the subjective reinterpretation of everyday objects. Across the majority of his films, Chaplin has a Midas touch for the ready-mades; whether it is a crushed oil can reconfigured into a shovel in Modern Times, or two rolls of bread stuck with forks reconfigured as miniature tap shoes in The Gold Rush, Chaplin’s Tramp legislates the artistic worth of anything and everything within reach.
Chaplin perfected an essentially in-exhaustive form that was used later in his career to satirize the issues and contradictions within industrial modernity. The dadaists, and later the American avant-garde, understood this shift towards consumerism within the valuation of art and provided an ironic response to it that highlighted and satirized this propensity for reciprocity.
Their response was predicated on this speculative gimmick, the subjective reconfiguration of the everyday objects in modernity, that called the entire efficacy of the art institution into question. Art critic and contemporary Russian philosopher Keti Chukhrov has written at length about this speculative streak in avant-garde art:
“From Duchamp to Warhol, the speculative gimmick added to the ready-made object was always openly claimed as part and parcel of the tacit Dadaist codex; it implied the sober acceptance of “evil,” since such an act allowed art to openly expose the inflated significance of — the act of instituting authority and its potential capitalization” (Chukhrov).
Today, we are seeing the same thing happen within crypto art, but on a mutated, dispersed, individualized level. That acceptance of “evil” that Chukrov details as central to the Dadaist ideology, a satiric commentary on the malign bureaucracy of the art institution, is now inverted, both materially and psychologically.
III. From Dada to Data
Instead of attempting to reduce the art world into nothingness as the Dadaists did, the crypto artists turn the art world into anything and everything. As neoliberal mutation of this avant-garde nihilism, crypto art seeks to wring the conceptual value out of the perpetually multiplying informational worlds of traceable data. In the crypto world, each artist replicates within themselves this designative power of the fine art institution, reversing and diffusing this axis of power, and framing it through a positive, additive, individualized lens.
However, in the case of both the dadaists and the NFT-minting crypto artists, nihilism remains central to the entire project, as does the speculative streak which Chukrov discusses at length.
In the case of avant-garde art in the early 20th century, such as Duchamp’s famous fountain piece, the value is generated from within, and the bureaucratic power of the art institution is projected inwards and satirized. Despite the central conceit of the work materially reaffirming the institutional power of the fine arts institution, dadaist art sought to internally critique this managerial structure by departing from reason entirely.
This negation of any and all reason generates an undercurrent of nihilism at the heart of dadaist art that exploited the designative power of fine art institutions.
The conceptual surplus of Duchamp’s fountain can be found within its relation to other fountains that are not in the museum; it creates this metaphysical surplus through negation and negativity. Crypto art and its surrounding promotion have attempted to embody this same ethos of institutional critique, but it does so through a narrative of positivity. The designative power to dictate the value of conceptual surplus is diffused to each individual artist.
Matt Bors, a famous (or reviled, depends on who you ask) political cartoonist, recently faced a wave of backlash after his decision to mint his widely shared “yet you participate in society” comic as a single edition Non-Fungible Token.
The comic, having taken on a life of its own over the years, has been shared presumably millions of times in differing online arguments across various social media platforms. This surplus of recognition directly informed the online backlash Bors received for his decision to mint the digital comic as an NFT; what makes that particular comic any more or less valuable than any one of the millions of other copies scattered across the internet?
The colloquial understanding of the comic’s online ubiquity spiritually resembles that of Duchamp’s fountain. Both pieces embody “the conceptualist logic of the ready-made[:] Nominally similar and identical objects are conceptually different” (Chukrov). There’s a similar question burning at the center of both pieces; what differentiates this conceptual object from the thousands of others exactly like it? For Crypto artists; in a legal sense, virtually nothing.
This individuated power inherent within the crypto art market has lead directly to the heinous trend of art scraping, where crypto collectors dredge online platforms to mint and sell another creator’s work as an NFT without their knowledge or consent. These crypto con-artists perceive digital art pieces on the whole in an inverted way to how Duchamp perceived the fountain.
To them, any piece that has not been bureaucratically designated as scarce, and thus valuable, has the potential to be once it is introduced into the blockchain; the internet offers these scammers a veritable ocean of what the dadaists referred to as readymades, ripe for induction into the NFT landscape. In the new world of big data, everything has conceptual surplus, and the NFT craze has given everyone the institutional power to delineate the value of that surplus. In Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han commented on how the nihilism of our new digital age relates back to the dadaist codex:
“Dataism, it turns out, is ammounting to digital dadaism. Dadaism also takes leave of meaningful contexts of every kind…Dataism is nihilism. It gives up on any and all meaning. Data and numbers are not narrative; they are addative” (59)
In the case of crypto art, the emphasis is not on the conceptual surplus, because everything has the potential for conceptual surplus in the NFT marketplace. Thus, the focus is centered on the creation of artificial, virtual scarcity. The ability to generate this digital scarcity exemplifies the projection of this designative power of the fine arts institution onto each individual artist. It provides tools for the artist which give them the kind of power that avant-garde artists of the past satirized the exclusive art institutions for possessing.
The power to administratively quantify the value of conceptual surplus in contemporary art no longer lies with the fine arts institutions, it lies with the individual themselves; regardless if they had any hand in the creation of the art. Thus, the institutional critique inherent within dadaist art diverges from crypto art in the sense that this institutional power is accepted on an individual level; not refuted, just mutated and replicated.
What was seen within Dadaism as the sober acceptance and satirization of institutional evil becomes, through crypto art, the destructive execution of institutional evil on an individual level.
It is no longer a negation, but an additive, positive practice. What is illustrated here is not a ‘revolution’ or ‘democratization’ of the art economy, but the diffusion of an outdated form of institutional power and the acceptance of positive neoliberal psychological conditioning.
The NFT boom has created an interconnected network of individuated fine-arts institutions in miniature.
NFTs function in a way that directly lends power to those who already have it. Grimes has made millions of dollars minting NFTs, Jack Dorsey recently minted his first tweet as one, and Azalea Banks recently minted an audio file of her sex tape (that last one is kinda cool, not gonna lie). The fact is, if you want to make money in crypto, you would’ve had to have bought in early, or had been rich already.
The nihilism of crypto art is thus necessarily baked into the entire formula; as illustrated by the research of Memo Akten and other digital artists, it is predicated on the steady increase of wasted energy. It doesn’t matter if that waste is comparatively lower than certain other industries or institutions because cryptocurrencies cannot functionally exist without this increasing wastefulness. For the value of crypto to go up, it needs to grow harder to attain over time. The harder it is to attain, the more energy is needed to be expended on mining over the course of time. That means what was once a process that could be executed on a laptop with relative ease will necessarily require more and more electricity to mine increasingly difficult Proof of Work puzzles as time goes on and demand for crypto art skyrockets. As Everest Pipkin notes in his essay against the inherent wastefulness of cryptocurrencies:
“There is nothing high-tech about it. There is no miracle. It is simply futures speculation without the speculation- no guessing required, because we know it will be more wasteful tomorrow; it is baked into the tech.”
IV. Hyper-Modern Times
In Modern Times, Chaplin’s Tramp character is no longer the originator of the film’s comedy, he is the subject of it. The machinery itself begins to take on the slapstick role of re-interpreting the Tramp himself, at points literally chewing him up and spitting him out, in an attempt to make him into a more disciplined subject of modernity. The Feeding Machine imposes slapstick comedy on the Tramp, as do the various machines within the factory itself. Even the new machinery of commercial life imposes comedy on the tramp, such as an escalator that forcibly carries him up and down the floors of a department store.
In all of these instances, the comedy lies within the humanization of the Tramp’s failed attempts to align with the new rhythms of industrial modernity. When the machinery of the powerful capitalists proves too complex for the Tramp’s usual schtick, his relationship to these machines is inverted.
Modern Times portrays a world where for the first time in his body of work, instead of choosing the different objects of his reinterpretation, Chaplin’s tramp itself becomes the subject of re-interpretation. He is constantly subjected to the will of different machines that attempt to reshape him into an ideal subject of industrial modernity, trying to improve his individual productive capacity.
Fitting for the era of industrial capitalism in which Modern Times is set, these machines are portrayed as tools of discipline with explicit acknowledgment paid to the asymmetries of power present in their operation. All the various technologies that serve to optimize Chaplin’s factory worker are very clearly displayed as being under the purview of the fictional boss.
Flash forward to the 1980s, where well-grounded fears towards personal computing forced IBM to conscript a humanizing face for its product. In each one of IBM’s different Chaplin-centric commercials, the Tramp character is no longer at the mercy of the machines, he is working in congruence with them. Chaplin’s tramp character, itself a representation of contradictions inherent within the inequities generated by industrial capitalism, is essentially reconstructed into the role of a small business owner. The dynamics of power are flattened, and the tramp is portrayed in a role antagonistic to its meaning and character.
Conversely, the undeniable individuality embodied by the tramp character is projected onto those who purchase and use IBM’s product. With all this in mind, the inverted subjectivity of industrial capitalism satirized in Modern Times feels eerily prophetic. As Byung-Chul notes in Psychopolitics;
“Neoliberal psychopolitics is dominated by positivity. Instead of working with negative threats, it works with positive stimuli” (36).
This shift away from disciplinary power and towards positive conditioning, to which Modern Times gestures at textually by framing the Tramp character itself as the object of reinterpretation, is fully realized meta-textually; when new technologies of neoliberal psychological power completely reinterpret the Tramp character as a salesman for the technology itself.
Across the majority of Chaplin’s body of work, the point of the tramp character is that his position or actions are the direct product of material disruptions on the part of industrial capitalism. Look no further than Modern Times, where the central conflicts and contradictions surrounding the tramp are all initiated by social inequities necessitated by the forward march of industrial capitalism. The foundational elements of Chaplin’s tramp are indictments of this oppressive system in and of themselves.
This reconfiguration of the tramp plays on the tensions between the fact of his universal appeal and the reasons behind his universal appeal. Through muting the socially critical elements of his art, Chaplin’s tramp becomes removed from any of the socio-economic contexts that led to his cultural omnipotence.
His timelessness and iconic status are presented as a given, flattening his overall ideological project and resulting in the creation of a decontextualized symbol of human experience. The tramp is turned into data and loses all meaning.
This is a clear-cut example of positive psychological conditioning used to coercively align atomized subjects in neoliberal society with the tools and circumstances that are most conducive to the continued extraction of capital and resources. What began with those in power using machinery to optimize human productivity has dispersed and diffused into a society of auto-exploiting individuals. This framework exploits the so-called entrepreneurial mentality that it seems so expressly designed to foster.
If you wanted to get rich during the gold rush, you could take your chances panning in a stream, or you could sell pickaxes and shovels to hopeful prospectors. Early investors in Crypto have a vested interest in more and more computing power becoming necessary for future investors; since this essentially the only way the price can go up. The entire formula depends on the competition between more and more users with increasingly powerful computers expending exponentially more energy.
Crypto artists provide this extractive endeavor with a humanizing face. They individualize the process even further, framing cryptocurrency platforms as egalitarian tools to revolutionize the art world on a personal level. All it does is sanitize and distract from how true value is generated within the blockchain, as well as co-opt the medium of digital art to justify crypto’s exchange of material scarcity for digital scarcity.
With non-fungible tokens and the structure of the crypto art community writ large, what is happening is essentially a way of coercively organizing an assumedly positive social milieu that is most conducive to the continued extraction of wealth and resources from the market in which it operates. This social organization has a friendly face, is presented as revolutionary, and most importantly, is completely fixated on individual achievement through competition. While this basic model of society is explicitly evident in our current hyper-atomized information culture, it is rooted in fundamental ideas of early neoliberal thought. This lineage is most clearly delineated in the writings of the post-WWII German ordo-liberals.
IV. Ordoliberalism
The concept of ordo-liberalism articulated in postwar Germany by thinkers like Willhelm Röpke was formulated as a response to the rise of collectivist ideology, intended to order society in a specific way that would both stimulate market activity and serve as a barrier to collective action. The ordo-liberalists believed that the failures of laissez-faire capitalism were not due to an unstable economic system, but rather a social network that did not complement necessary aspects of the market. Ordo-liberalism was centered around creating model social conditions for the market by a focus on using individual economic actors to stoke market competition.
In The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society by Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, a comprehensive genealogy of Neoliberalism’s ideological origins is presented, with ordo-liberalism framed as foundational to the formation of certain elements within neoliberal psychopolitics:
“To summarize: (ordo-liberalist) policy intervenes directly in the ‘framework’ or conditions of existence of the market in such a way as to realize the principles of the economic constitution; regulatory policy…takes the form of vigilance and surveillance intended to remove all obstacles to the free play of competition” (87).
This belief in the power of competition as foundational to the perpetuation of the market economy, a fundamental belief held by many early neoliberal theorists, itself posed an important question amongst their ranks; what is the most effective way to stimulate the presence of this competition? Their answer, as Dardot and Laval point out, lies in the social organization of individuals:
“The market economy can only operate if it is based on a society that furnishes it with the ways of being, values, and desires it requires” (92).
For the ordo-liberals, fostering these values in a social order began with a process of hyper-atomization. What takes precedent in this social furnishing is the compartmentalization of the individual, which in and of itself is meant to encourage competition. The truth of this mode of social organization can be found in its three main focuses; “decentralization, de-proletarianization, [and] de-urbanization” (96). Wilhelm Röpke and his contemporaries believed that theoretically if each German worker was given his own individual plot of land to work, instead of all working together in a centralized location like a factory, that each individual worker would internally come to realize the social good his labor contributes to the market economy.
Röpke believed that if this realization could have a powerful enough effect on individuals to subsequently encourage competition between them and the other workers, then the market would be able to flourish. Much of his writing centers around this idea;
“It is not the market economy that has failed to function; the supporting framework has given way” (96).
For Röpke, as well as many neoliberal theorists after him, it wasn’t the market that was failing us; it was we who were failing the market. This entire structure illustrates the long history of furnishing the circumstances of individuals with the necessary tools to integrate them fully into the economy in an attempt to warp their perception of their actual role in the market itself. Röpke elaborated upon this concept and formulated this idea that remains a central strain of neoliberal ideology: that it is the responsibility of the individual to organize their own economic life under these specific aforementioned conditions;
“Whether in relation to private property, family, household, insurance or pension, in such a way that their life makes them ‘a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise’” (100).
The best social circumstances to reinforce an extractive economic model, devised by one of the originators of neoliberal thought, appear to be an atomized web of competing entrepreneurs who achieve their self-actualization through market participation.
It all comes back to manipulation of the internal, psychological understanding of how the self is articulated in relation to both other individuals and to the broader economic system. If every individual view themselves in some fashion or another as an entrepreneur, the failings of capitalism could always be framed as mere opportunities for “disruption” and “innovation”; just bugs, not features.
Crypto artists fulfill an essential role in this neoliberal project of individuated coercion. They provide the human face that psychologically normalizes destructive and technocratic new forms of capitalist wealth and resource extraction on an individual level.
V. Entrepreneurial Artist
Our contemporary society operates in a way that directly echos the conceptions dictated by the Ordo-Liberals; everyone is a unique individual, an inventive entrepreneur, and their own economic project. In keeping with the ordo-liberalist focus on cultivating personal affinity with the market on an internalized individual level, the contemporary neoliberal regime doesn’t just reshape the subject into an auto-exploiting entrepreneur; those in power subtly and psychological coerce the individual into believing they chose this role themselves.
Yet again, punishment is replaced with manipulation, predicated on providing a humanizing representation of the individual’s role in the market economy: “Physical discipline has given way to mental optimization” (Han). The 80’s computer ads illustrate a more explicit example of this control, while the hype and discourse around the crypto art market serves as a more obfuscated example of this psychological coercion.
Through these tactics of psychopolitical control, the execution of disciplinary practice are also diffused into the realm of the individual. Those who aren’t constantly searching for new avenues of profit are left to be swept up in the perpetual crises of global financial capitalism. The unactualized entrepreneurial self is inherently penalized through their non-participation. This process frames the entrepreneurial self as a project, in Willhelm Ropke’s words; “a permanent multiple enterprise.” It relegates the actualization of the self to the realm of the market in an attempt to heighten individual commitment to economic activity.
The market can only truly function if every individual is only concerned with the primacy of their own economic actions; it is fueled by perpetuating this self-interested conception. This provides context to the public valorization of individualized Crypto artists; they are held up as decontextualized symbols of self-actualization attained through market engagement. As Byung-Chul Han notes:
“The self as a work of art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains to exhaust its resources entirely” (28).
These tactics of control are so sinister due to their internality. Neoliberal power doesn’t discipline the individual subject into a position of auto-exploitation; it instead diffuses and interiorizes this process of exploitation as the responsibility of the self, wherein it is viewed as individual freedom.
VI. “You Just Don’t Get It”
Essentially everyone who has voiced opposition to crypto art, or cryptocurrencies of any variety, has faced down a wave of online rage coming from the scores of people who have invested their money and belief into these new digital currencies. While this cycle of outrage is generally cacophonous and vitriolic, a certain theme has almost become somewhat of a mantra for proponents of crypto; if you don’t like it, it's just because, in some way or another, you don’t fully understand it.
The supposedly “revolutionary” aspects of the crypto, when they are defended online by cryptocurrency investors, resemble a dogmatic adherence to the efficacy of the entire concept on a social level. In short, they believe that those who critique crypto do so only because they do not fully comprehend how the entire system works. If they would just buy into it, they would see what all the hype is about. This frequent defense of cryptocurrencies plays on the same neoliberal ethos of additive positivity.
The subject, when totally subsumed within the new individualized technologies of wealth and resource extraction by those in power, develops a kind of Stockholm syndrome. In a similar fashion to the ordering policy of postwar german liberal thinkers, crypto sublimates the actualization of the self into a social milieu of entrepreneurial competition that both heightens the individual’s commitment to the market and internalizes the processes of their own exploitation.
Once the individual is inducted into this social order, their self-realization becomes inextricably tied to this new form of technology, and it ends up becoming definitive to their identity. If this belief that individual entrepreneurial spirit is truly revolutionary can be fostered within the subject of neoliberal society by the calculated organization of their social milieu, it makes perfect sense that this subject would then defend their participation in these new modes of auto-exploitation from a perspective of possessing a supposedly more comprehensive understanding of these technologies.
There’s a central tautology to this defense that becomes more and more apparent with the increasingly obvious destructive ecological cost of mining crypto. The more frequently the process is widely cited as having such a devastating effect on the environment, the less convincing the crypto investors are in their pleas for critics to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how the system actually functions. At this point, the excess of data and information becomes obfuscatory, not illuminatory. Like Dadaism, it reduces everything to nothingness, but in an inverted and positive manner; just traceable lines of code whizzing across a screen. It has value so long as it is collectively believed to have value. An illustration of this can be found in a 2014 paper by Spanish economist Antonio Escoda that served as a basic introduction to the structure of Bitcoin:
“As with all fiduciary currencies, i.e. currencies not backed by precious metals, the bitcoin will have long-term value as long as it is commonly accepted as a medium of exchange and a store of value. The greater its acceptance, the more it will tend to be worth.”
The more investors believe cryptocurrencies to have value, the more valuable they become. This is exemplary of how neoliberal power detaches life from itself and hinges its existence on the social logic of interaction between atomized entrepreneurial individuals. Under these circumstances, fostering a more comprehensive individual understanding of how crypto works is complying with the psychological coercion of neoliberal power and its unending chorus of progress and optimization.
Those who are critical of crypto are often told that if they just had more information, they would come to realize its revolutionary characteristics.
This is complete and utter bullshit.
Nobody needs to know the exact mechanical processes or temperature at which a flare stack burns off excess natural gas to know that it should definitely not be happening. It doesn’t matter if a select few people make enormous sums of money off of it, nor does it matter if it is marginally better than certain alternatives; it is destroying the planet. Full stop.
If Shell responded to this comment with articles explaining the exact specifications of their gas flares or plans to start considering the possibility of flare reduction within the next few decades, the asymmetry of power would be blindingly obvious and the information presented would immediately be written off as a P.R. tactic. However, this asymmetry of power is less obvious when thousands of disparate individuals participate in this same practice of informational obfuscation. “Decentralization” on full display.
It is very easy to be made to feel stupid for thinking crypto is stupid. The presumed complexity of the system serves as a barrier against critique from anyone who doesn’t subscribe to its internal logic. But this, in and of itself, is illustrative of both the individual sublimation under the logic of auto-exploitation and the necessity of atomized entrepreneurship as fuel for the perpetual competition that powers contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han details these issues within this contradictory notion of intelligence:
“Intelligence follows the logic of a system. It is system-immanent. A given system defines a given intelligence” (147)
In a certain sense; it is actually a good thing to have a less than comprehensive understanding of the amorphous digital world of crypto. By focusing on the destructive ecological cost of NFTs, instead of the complexities of its operation or its positive effects, the internal logic of this system no longer serves as a barrier to critiquing it.
Frankly, having little more than a cursory understanding of how crypto functions puts one in a perfect position to critique it. When the ecological issues are fundamentally baked into the tech, compartmentalization of the system’s functionality only serves to disguise this underlying truth. Looking at crypto from a broader, macrocosmic perspective eliminates the excess of information that cushion the truly despicable central aspects of crypto.
VII. Blame Game
An essential point to keep in mind in reference to the IBM commercials is that the entire premise of the ads was founded on public perception of Chaplin’s Tramp as an everyman; a universal indicator of shared human experience. However, the simple premise of Chaplin’s Tramp character as an “everyman” is a completely decontextualized mischaracterization. Chaplin’s Tramp character was created by and in direct opposition to, the inherent inequitable contradictions of industrialization and global capitalism.
The fact that so many people identified with this character serves less as proof of Chaplin’s universalist humanity, and more as an indictment of a system that forces so many into a position where they would identify with a character who is so obviously a satire of socioeconomic inequality. As Steven Papson notes in his analysis of the IBM Tramp, the tramp’s status as a universally recognized figure does not make him, in any sense, an everyman:
“The Tramp is a creation of the social disruptions which Chaplin personally experienced. The disruptions themselves were the consequence of the expansion of industrial capitalism. And yet, Chaplin’s tramp is not remembered as a representative of a particular period of U.S. history but as an “Everyman.” (Papson).
The valorization of digital artists in the context of the NFT marketplace follows a similar path of reinterpretation that rinses these individuals of the socioeconomic context that led them to occupy their current position.
While individuality of the crypto artist is foregrounded, and the ecological destruction of the medium is sidelined, there is another aspect of this narrative that is omitted almost entirely; consideration of the conditions that lead many digital artists to the NFT market in the first place.
To reiterate; it is very difficult to make a living as a digital artist, and NFTs provide them with a way to seemingly stabilize that precarity. With so many digital artists trumpeting the egalitarian structure of crypto art, it is hard not to get swept up in this fervor of positivity. As Geert Lovink notes in his section of the Hybrid Manifesto:
“We all feel we’re part of an alchemical movement aiming to redefine money with the potential for a radical redistribution of wealth” (Lovink).
It is difficult to blame digital artists for hopping onto a trend that has the potential to free them from longstanding precarity. However, considering what the NFT market has devolved into with its art-scrapers abound, it has actually taken away one of the most important components of digital art through its emphasis on digital scarcity, as Everest Pipkin notes in his incredible piece HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?”:
“Digital artists have media that can proliferate over a network and be held by many people at once without cheapening or breaking the aura of a first-hand experience. It is the one true benefit to working in digital space.”
When it becomes clear that this new movement only reinforces existing asymmetries of power, as well as replicates them on the individual level, the reasons for expressly focusing instead on the economic actualization of a select few individual crypto artists become clear.
The humanization and valorization of Non-Fungible Tokens through the crypto art boom acts as a smokescreen to distract from its technocratic superstructure and irreparable environmental impact.
In our current hyper-modern times, the individual subject is in a state of constant re-interpretation at the behest of the complex machinery of global capitalism, all in the hopes of fostering an entrepreneurial spirit within every subject of this regime of optimization. Like the case of the IBM Tramp, the increasingly comprehensive psychopolitics of neoliberal power must necessarily graft a positive, humanized face onto the unstable, ever-shifting technologies that uphold its existence in order to psychologically acclimate us to their presence. The sinister neoliberal structure of NFT’s is smuggled into the public consciousness underneath the charming human faces of the individual artists within the crypto art community.
This new model of artistic exchange fully embodies the neoliberal conception of the entrepreneurial subject; that of atomized individuals powering the machine of globalized capitalism framed as some kind of revolutionary social positive.
The new flexibility crypto offers, the presumed ease of minting an NFT, the higher prices digital artists can offer for their work, all function exclusively on the back of wanton destruction of the environment and normalization of technocratic forms of power and control. Even with consideration paid to the benefits of the Crypto art market to select digital artists; It is a nihilistic instance of exchanging material scarcity for virtual scarcity; trading our precarious ecological position to inflate the speculative value of a digital currency.
