Against Solutionism. A thread

Through a solutionist lens, the world is like a video game with puzzles that must be cracked in order to unlock a new level where more advanced puzzles have to worked out, until you eventually win the game
(1/13) This mindset is wildly popular in Silicon Valley, and other entreprenurial cultures, where startup founders justify everything they do with reference to some imagined problem that they’re solving
(2/13)

What's the difference between a libertarian, socialist, anarchist and centrist take on CBDC?

Let's start with libertarians... (1/5) Socialists enter the house... (2/5)

I drew pictures of 9 different forms of payment!

Payment Type 1: Government Money Creation
Description: Government issues Layer 1 credits to banks, which issue Layer 2 digital casino chips to us
(1/10) Payment Type 2: The Intra-Bank Transfer
Description: Bank moves digital chips from one of its account holders to another
(2/10)

How to build the Myth of Barter and use it to create a false 'History of Money' in 7 steps

Step 1: Map your present-day situation: Walk into the street. What do u see? You see strangers (people who don't know each other) exchanging specialised goods and services for money (1/8) Step 2: Eliminate the thing you wish to be invented in the past. You want to write a ‘history of money’, so eliminate money from the present (2/8)

When it comes to money, we experience the world as squirrels. We see money as a mysterious acorn that we must get from other squirrels

By contrast, the state experiences the world like an oak tree. It issues the acorns & wants squirrels to take them to spread the forest (1/13) In other words, the state doesn't want the money it issues, any more than an oak tree desires to hold onto its acorns. It wants people to take it, because as people take it, the state spreads its power (2/13)

It's good to see people getting more critical about cashless society, but often their main concern is about governments doing surveillance of our digital payments. In reality, there are at least 9 other reasons to fight cashless society, all of which are just as important (1/10) 1) Corporate data exploitation: It's true that Big Brother states exploit payments data, but 'Big Bouncer' corporates spy on your payments data to decide if you get access to things, while 'Big Butler' corporates use it to creepily manipulate you

https://twitter.com/Suitpossum/status/1594661228768632840

(2/10)

A pro-cash position is anti-corporate and anti-privatisation, because 'cashless' infrastructure is corporate and the digital money moved within it is privately issued by the banking sector.

Why then do I often seem to get more support from the far-right than the left? (1/9) Is it because people who are suspicious of corporate power are increasingly being captured by far-right conspiracy narratives, while corporates coat themselves in a thin marketing veneer of left-liberalism, thereby enabling corporate power to be presented as 'leftist'? (2/9)

Cloudmoney launches in the US/Canada today!

USA is caught between West Coast tech titans & East Coast finance barons who fuse via fintech. Physical cash blocks this merger, leading to anti-cash ideology, all while crypto speculation escalates. Here are 10 reasons to care (1/12) 1) The cash economy is demonized, yet it provides life support for millions of people who don't trust the banking sector, or who feel excluded by it. Remember that the 'cashless society' is a bank-dominated society, championed by the very institutions behind the 2008 crisis...

I've heard a lot of people claim that Bitcoin is somehow a unique weapon to protect yourself from inflation. The current #cryptocrash should make you doubt that, but I used to work in 'inflation hedging', so let me offer a perspective to help you decide for yourself. Thread 1/15 I used to work in 'inflation derivatives' markets. I'll explain what those are, but let me start by saying that during that time I learned that there are basically four ways to hedge yourself against inflation...

Here’s a somewhat philosophical take on the politics of money.

I'm fascinated by monetary systems because they simultaneously connect and separate us. They enable us to interact with distant strangers, but often at the expense of weakening our reliance on closer kin (1/14) We work in huge depersonalised markets because we have huge depersonalised monetary systems that enable vast collectives of people - ‘the public’ - to operate as an interdependent economic web. But it makes a difference as to what form the units of money take (2/14)

'Cashlessness' is often slowly engineered from the top down. Here's an example of how this happens:

In 2019 Visa entered into a sponsorship deal with the NFL, but made it dependent on the Super Bowl 'going cashless'... (1/11) In 2020 this was pushed under the guise of helping people avoid contact during Covid, but this is BS. Not only have major health bodies rejected the thesis that cash spreads covid, but the NFL admitted that the 'decision to go cashless was in the works before the pandemic' (2/11)

It's with deep joy that I present my new book to the world today. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets.

What's it about? Cards seem convenient and crypto seems cool, but the book lays out a contrarian argument for why cash is more crucial than ever (1/20) The book rejects the idea that a move towards a cashless society is a 'bottom up' phenomenon driven by us all. It shows why our decisions to ‘go cashless’ are often slowly engineered from the top down... (2/20)

An impressionistic sketch of my position on Bitcoin.

Firstly, Bitcoin uses a radical decentralised architecture (which appeals to people on both the libertarian right and anarchist left) to implement - in theory - a monetary system that appeals to conservative thought.

1/6 But that conservative vision of Bitcoin as a kind of 'commodity money' is actually never realised, and is largely a myth. Rather, it serves as a *marketing* story for the true Bitcoin, which is a limited supply collectible bought and sold for money.

2/6

When a bank creates money it doesn't issue the money to itself. It issues it as an asset to *somebody else*, and experiences that as a *liability*. When a Bitcoin miner creates new tokens, by contrast, they issue those *to themselves* as an asset. There's no liability side

1/7 Bitcoin tokens may have no liability side, but they have one similarity to bank-issued money. They are 'created from nothing', in the sense that they are simply written into existence. It's just that you have to sweat a lot before doing that writing...

2/7

Understanding of modern money is jammed by a noun-verb confusion. Here's why:

In English, the verb 'deposit' typically creates a noun of the same name: "the flood deposited sand in the river and now there's a sand deposit in the river"

Never apply this to money! (1/9) Unfortunately, people do mistakenly apply this same convention to money: "I deposited cash in the bank & now I have a deposit in the bank"

What's the mistake? The noun 'deposit' in banking actually refers to something *issued out* by a bank, not something that is *put in*

(2/9)

With Bitcoin's rising price I get many people asking me my opinion about it: Here are nine tips

1) Don't take advice about Bitcoin from those with a vested interest in seeing its price rise. That's like listening to CDO dealer in 2006. When prices go up, critical thought go down 2) Bitcoin is fascinating from a tech perspective, but don't fall for the rhetoric of monetary revolution. I was among the early users of Bitcoin & actually tried to use it as 'money', but it's not a monetary system. It's a system of cyber-collectibles, priced in dollars

Sometimes it seems like I'm a little skeptical about Bitcoin. Yes I am. Here's why: I've never bought Bitcoin. I've only earned it. I've actually earned quite a bit of it, but never hoarded it and rather only spent it. My aim was to increase circulation to see if it could... work as *currency*. Those of us who did this actually created a lot of the early media interest around crypto & this interest brought in many of the speculators. Many of those second-wave speculators are now a core part of the 'crypto-twitter' punditry with the loudest voices...