Bitcoin and “black” nobility

The logic of the present paradigm shift implies traditional capital leaving the historical stage to give way to new post-capitalist forms of value aggregation. Both Karl Marx and Adam Smith are too obsolete to keep dictating to people what to do with their assets. Conventional money is an integral part of the deadly anachronistic System. Whatever reforms can be conducted within the System, nothing can make it more relevant to the zeitgeist. It is reaching its expiration faster and faster. The younger generations will have to decide what is better: to keep the anemic old wreck in a hospice at any cost or let him die to make space for the post-capitalist models.

The models we are talking about constitute the following groups: 1) what is to be created tomorrow when societies will transit to a post-social state and 2) what is available today as an alternative to the traditional banking system. The second group includes cryptocurrencies as a decentralized payment technology inside the still centralized global financial system. Crypto is quite an immature cumbersome solution running on the edge between two paradigms. Some kind of a young gimp threatening the old wreck of “bubblenomics”. The majority of crypto enthusiasts have to admit that neither Bitcoin nor altcoins can be a fully-fledged substitution for conventional money today.

Having only a decade-long history crypto is accepted by a tiny segment of the world population among which middle and lower classes prevail. Only a few individuals from the so-called elites have expressed their views on crypto. Negative in most cases.

No, there is no information vacuum around crypto in modern media. Crypto is a specific industry whose discourse occupies a certain niche on the internet. However, crypto seems to remain a taboo topic for intellectuals from the upper class. Neither well-grounded criticism nor a deep philosophical reflection on cryptocurrencies has been delivered by contemporary academic thinkers. This strange fact makes some conspiracy theorists suppose that something more than ignorance stays behind the silence of elites. Why is crypto so toxic for the intellectuals from the top stratum? Maybe crypto is immanent to networks while the elite is transcendent to what is going to turn a social fabric into horizontal post-hierarchical clusters.

However, such an explanation cannot satisfy the very elite who sees how crypto activists are threatening the existing status quo. A decentralized charge-back system requiring no intermediaries (banks) is a direct challenge to the ideology of consumer society. And we know that consumer society embraces the entire socium today. Decentralized payments in currencies emitted by someone other than central banks are antisocial in nature. And those who use them can get away from the mass consumerist hypnosis.

The simplest approach would be to marginalize crypto by making it equal to hacking, illegal weapons, drug traffic, and pedophilia unless the elites have direct relationships with crypto to ban it. We see how crypto is leaving the marginalized geeky field for a wide public discourse in global media. And some celebrities have to provide their feedback on crypto anyway.

For example, a super banker Jamie Dimon was talking trash about Bitcoin while his bank JPMorgan Chase was developing its own crypto for bank-to-bank transactions. When it was finally deployed, Mr. Dimon radically changed his rhetoric in accordance with circumstances. The National Bank of China hints at the crypto-RMB that seems to be issued shortly as an asymmetric response to the Trade War initiated by the American Government. Whenever it happens the dollar’s domination would face troubles since many crypto-friendly safe havens have been established in Switzerland, Estonia, Singapore, Malta. Thus, the scope and scale of influence provided by blockchain technology (crypto) cannot be ignored at any level any longer.

Nevertheless, the organized world elites in the person of the international bureaucracy along with famous think tanks are reluctant to deliver any consistent crypto discourse. The most influential think tank — the Club of Rome, whose reports are usually accepted as the guidance for global powers, is still keeping silent about crypto. This is especially strange in the light of the latest report (2018) in which the Club suggests how to meet the toughest challenges of these days in the economy, ecology, politics, and religion.

The report explains how to build a new more sustainable world order. It reanimates the long-neglected philosophy with the help of neo-spiritual achievements of such advocates of the “weak theology” as Ken Wilber. Besides, the Club appreciates the latest encyclical of Pope Francis. Once the report is easily available on the internet, there is no point in listing off all its provisions herein. In general, the report calls for building a post-industrial post-capitalist society with all possible implications.

A brief digression from the main point should be done here. The Club’s approach in itself sounds like an oxymoron. This is weird when elitist intellectuals offer a set of measures leading to the elimination of the very phenomenon of elites. What is the so-called post-society if not an absolutely different type of social relations where no vertical hierarchy is available? All the technologies described in the report belong to the future post-industrial economy which, in turn, implies post-society. In other words, the report implicitly reveals suicidal recommendations for the present upper class.

It’s hard to believe that the Club’s intellectuals were unaware of the consequences of shifting to the post-capitalist world order when they were creating the report. Cheap grandstanding when explicitly declared tasks should be accomplished exactly the opposite seems even more unbelievable. Most probably, the Club clearly realizes how dangerous the post-society is for elites. And the report reflects neither a fake nor an attempt to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes. They count on quite significant inertia inherent in global institutions that will be bogged down by their bureaucracy and greed despite their obedience to follow the recommendations of the Club. The present elites are confident in their invulnerability.

They have years and years to move slowly to a new paradigm. They will securely control every step of the way. Surprises may arise only when either a counter-elite suddenly claims its right to dominance or an unforeseeable technological leap emerges to mess up the agenda. Both variants are theoretically possible to be highly unlikely in practice.

However, the Club could make the report to remind powers-that-be whose intellectual strength provides them with power. That could be another demonstration of supremacy in decrypting signs and symbols, in bringing some meaning to unstructured data. Once again the Club showed to both plebs and elites that the true knowledge kept staying a privilege for the few.

Anyway, the Club’s vision of the future resonates quite well with what the cryptoeconomy offers. So, the logical question arises: why does the Club of Rome advocating the post-industrial future keep silent about such a postmodern phenomenon as crypto?

To answer this question correctly, we should first try to figure out whose interests the Club of Rome supports. Trivial and, therefore, the wrong answer is that the Club of Rome serves the “global elite” as if it is a consolidated group of influential personalities. But the truth is that different elitist groups do not constitute a unified integrated structure having a common agenda. The so-called global elite is not homogeneous. The fact that some liberal thinkers are members of the Club of Rome does not mean per se that the Club supports a liberal paradigm as a whole. The very content of the report reflects certain ambivalence regarding liberal values.

On the one hand, democracy, free market, human rights, and the other attributes of the liberals’ pathos are supported by the report. On the other hand, the current model of a liberal economy based on financial speculations and rampant consumerism is severely criticized. Besides, the report suggests reconsidering the secular principles of modern society gently but steadily. It calls for creating a new synthetic religious philosophy based on oriental spiritual doctrines and metaphysical accomplishments of such modern thinkers as Ken Wilber and Fritjof Capra.

It goes beyond a framework of the present liberal society where the scientific realism of modernity dominates. It is a clear sign of a postmodernist approach to both religion and philosophy. “Weak theology”, “fast-food religion”, and “soft-core spirituality” are just a few names of the current trend evolving in the Western culture in contrast to the traditional European “hard-core religiosity” with its classical Catholicism and Protestantism.

In doing so, the Club follows postmodernism that appreciates “nihilistic doubt on everything” where religion is no exception. Postmodernists are questioning both scientific understanding of the world and all traditional sacral doctrines. That’s why many immutable pillars of previous paradigms can hardly find the same solid ground in the upcoming postmodern age. In such an aspect, the Club is obviously flirting with something other than the present liberal order.

It seems the Club is trying to confront neither liberals nor their opponents through wearing a couple of hats, as they say. But who constitutes the opposite pole to liberals today? Both today’s left and right couldn’t oppose liberals since both communists and fascists have lost the battle with the liberal ideology completely long ago. They both cannot propose more or less influential thinkers whose opinions are worth taking into account by the Club. Both failed ideologies are left in the outgoing industrial era while the Club is trying to find paths to the future.

Besides, if we observe both movements from a broader perspective we can find that they represent opposite ends of the same liberal axle: Marx and Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini all were fighting for the hegemony of different social groups, but values determining the very pathos of their fight were following the final goal of liberal world order — a comfortable stay in a physical universe with a particular distribution of material wealth.

Thus, radicals and traditionalists remain for our consideration.

The camp of modern radicals is weak and fragmented due to the absence of a consensual universally-shared ideology. After the Marxist International abated, a common protest discourse capable of uniting different radicals for protests against the world System has disappeared. Some sporadic alliances that eventually emerge from time to time on the ground of the temporarily coinciding agendas cannot live long.

Of course, radicals remain the “perpetually fermenting dough” of protest against the fundamental injustice inherent in modern society. But both the insignificant number of the true radicals and the lack of a unifying protest discourse make their opposition to the present liberal world order almost irrelevant. Radicals obviously stay beyond the interests of the Club of Rome for another simple reason: they do not accept the so-called “universal human values”. It means that building a new sustainable society of conscious consumption together with radicals is merely meaningless.

The establishment and radicals disagree about the system of coercion of the silent majority. The task of the Club is to keep the System going by upgrading it step-by-step while radicals seek to destroy the system as a whole. ISIS, for example, is a pure antagonist of the liberal world order being, at the same time, an enemy for any sort of elites. It can not and does not have any point of convergence with the Club’s goals.

That’s why only traditionalists remain. In the present context, we are not talking about folklore enthusiasts, monarchists, admirers of Julius Evola, homophobes, anti-globalists, anti-feminists, and neo-Luddites. The traditionalists whose interests the Club of Rome, most probably, supports are the so-called counter-elite in the persons of hereditary nobles and top-level clerics. Various secret orders are also included. Besides, many transnational corporations, international bureaucracy, and mafia constitute that group as well. The most consistent description of the traditionalists’ topography belongs to one of the greatest philosophers of nowadays Geydar Dzhemal (1947–2016).

We will call the conglomerate of traditionalists the “Royals” hereinafter since this term belongs to the vocabulary of conspiracy theorists whose discourse is in sync with our own. So, the Royals lost a global hegemony twice (after both World Wars) in the 20th century when widely-understood liberal powers made them go dark. Now, the traditionalists are looking for retaliation against the contemporary ruling liberals. But they are not going to do it unceremoniously with a high hand. They are preparing a patiently created paradigm shift.

The modern age has been under the control of liberals mostly, but the postmodern era will be in hands of some different power. And the only decent candidate for such a role is old aristocracy. In other words, both monarchy and church under updated images should come back to replace the present ruler of the global order — liberals.

Here we should make a brief digression on what we consider the very paradigm of postmodernity. For the present moment, postmodernity has various interpretations. This is quite explainable since it is about something that is just arriving. Perhaps, in the days of the traditional society, there were not fewer futuristic concepts of how the advanced industrial era should look like. There was no clear roadmap that could be used by the civilization on its way to modernity. And most probably, the achieved results of that movement would shock the thinkers of the then transitional period.

A similar situation takes place today when a vision of postmodernity is spread over a wide range of opinions. None of the philosophers, historians, economists have a right to claim a full understanding of the transitional agenda of the present paradigm shift. Nobody has a holistic picture of the reality resulting from that shift. We can only try to describe postmodernity in an apophatic way, rejecting those features of the actual paradigm that will hardly characterize the post-humanity. It looks more like a game of Battleship with shooting at yet invisible targets.

We are eager to see a new paradigm as the long-awaited realization of the so-called “null” humanity with which human history could come to its end. None of the previous civilizations has reached the true end of history, whatever Francis Fukuyama along with the other liberal thinkers could claim.

Under the true end of history, we understand the stoppage of the wheel of samsara, we seek to step out of the constantly-reiterating fate imposed on us by a heritage of ancestors locked in a three-dimensional sphere of the space-time continuum with its everlasting entropy. The end of history implies post-humans capable of escaping from the cosmic screw crusher that turns generations after generations into mince to feed the very Being determined by its own ontology to resist the second law of thermodynamics.

To let the end of history come true, it is necessary to find a way to the fourth dimension beyond the Matrix. Any resources inherent in human biology won’t be of any help, as illustrated by entire human history. It is not for sure, but the future super-industrial civilization has a hypothetical opportunity to chew its way out to the fourth dimension. The gnoseological capacity of information technologies promises to break through the entropic sphere of eternal ontology that implies a horrific repeating of the same thing over and over again. The evolution of computers hints at reaching some critical threshold in the utilization of information flows beyond which humanity will be able to leave a cyclic model of reproduction.

We imagine a superhuman as a fully self-sufficient monad having unlimited access to knowledge. A lonely hero who has no need to sacrifice his own time to the Supreme Being via an interface of any hierarchical society. We see a human-as-existence, as a final realization of the will to power, as a unique point of presence triumphing over manifested substance.

A double punch to the present order of things is required to reach such a state of being. It should consist of a super-pragmatic philosophy of the last hero who forced his own nihilism to the maximal loneliness. Besides, both great personal courage (indeed, the true postmodernity is not about gender-neutral biomass of the consumer society!) and disruptive information technology that nullifies any sort of monopoly over knowledge should emerge. Such a double punch to the gut of the matrix can not only stop it in the physical layer but also eliminate its subtle ruling principle of Being-as-good.

If we address postmodernity at such an angle, i.e. as a final stage of development of homo sapiens which began as a cluster of protein-based bodies in the meaningless ecological niche of the Golden Age and which should end up with a hyper-informed post-individual having access to the virtual fourth dimension, then some popular projects of postmodernity do not maintain any criticism. Any political aspect is unavailable in them while plenty of non-essential pseudo-philosophical concepts are represented as utopian social problematique.

Since the field of speculations on the issue is limited with nothing today, various epatage simulacra of postmodernist discourse keep emerging. They grab the attention of that rare audience who is still capable of thinking independently in the days when the majority is stupefied with endless chewing of trivial topics of consumerism.

What reasonable and pragmatically utilitarian does the famous figure of the contemporary “academic” posthumanism Donna Haraway offer us with her variations of dark but hollow fantasies of Howard Lovecraft? What is a practical sense of all those suckered arms and tentacles a la Cthulhu for the future post-society? Her summoning in the area of htonic archetypes for the fun of students and publishers is just getting lost in the weeds of trivial biologism. What is in it for breaking through the matrix? It seems madame Haraway found an empty business niche when she supplied Lovecraft taken out from mothballs with postmodern connotations.

Or take, for example, the so-fancy object-oriented ontology. This is truly ridiculous: they are speculating about the society of things, about giving civil rights to objects, and about the ontological equalization of humans with all other living creatures. It can be considered as rather a mental prestidigitation for the highbrow intellectuals who cannot be titillated intensively enough by contemporary pop culture. What reformation of the matrix can they talk about if they are missing the very cornerstone of any society — the relationships between a slave and a lord? This is nothing but an imitation of movement towards postmodernity without any practical implementation of their “original” post-sociological ideas.

It seems only French classics of postmodern philosophy (Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Baudrillard) remain the only actual thinkers in the epoch of the paradigm shift. They at least could propose revolutionary postmodernist concepts (Deleuze’s rhizome) in their days. And all contemporary imitators are premised on those concepts.

In this regard, we propose to consider the Royals as a force capable of embracing postmodern discourse to achieve hegemony in the foreseeable future. We suppose that the qualitative characteristics of components constituting such a socio-political conglomerate are sufficient to let the Royals finalize modernity in their confrontation with liberals. They can act in the same manner as all the other postmodernist actors can — to deny apophatically the elements of the existing paradigm of modernity.

At the same time, the Royals can practically implement their specific agenda. Another advantage of the Royals is a deep knowledge of their “corporate” history that provides them with a powerful reflection on premodernity. In general, postmodernist discourse flirts with premodernity all the time, taking the latter as a former but applicable alternative to modernity. That’s why the traditionalists are capable of putting such flirting into practice.

So, according to the Royals’ plan, both the updated monarchy and church should get back in leadership positions to replace the current civilizational helmsman — the liberals. In order to accomplish it in the right way, many basic social values should be reformed unobtrusively. A fundamental reinterpretation of what we are used to taking as a norm is needed. Not without reason, the expression “new normal” is at the height of its “semantic career” today. The matrix should be reloaded, but it is necessary not to interrupt the process of milking herds of plebs with redundant social upheaval. Nobody but the Club of Rome fits the task in a way few others do.

Here, another brief digression is necessary. The very name of traditionalists hints at a certain tradition they follow. This is not about any tradition of liberal institutions of the modern age. Both nobles and clerics are campaigning for the abolition of the results of all revolutionary changes that have been achieved in modernity. Paradoxically, but namely the church was the end beneficiary if not the prime agent of many social revolutions. This counter-intuitive (from a historical perspective) moment requires explanations, and we will get back to it later. Now, it is just worth keeping in mind that the Royals seek to cancel namely the outcomes of modernity that do not match their project expectations.

They are looking for a chance to bring power back to those who were deprived of it due to scientific, industrial, and social revolutions. The contemporary traditionalists support the pre-modern values of both monarchy and the Church against which the modern age was fighting. There was a confrontation between the third estate (bourgeoisie, liberal professions, and lumpen proletarians) and the two elite estates — nobles and clerics when modernity came to replace traditional society. The third estate won the battle providing the bourgeoisie with hegemony in early capitalism. Later, in the era of liberal “bubblenomics” opportunistic financial speculators seized power.

That’s why the present agenda of the Royals paradoxically corresponds to what the postmodern future promises. The Royals are organically against the liberals (don’t let their joint participation in such projects as the European Union lead you astray). At the same time, they realize that neither archaic civilization nor the premodern paradigm can be reanimated in their historical forms.

The majority of traditionalists belong to the world elite whose secret orders (Masons, Opus Dei, Order of Malta, etc) aggregate a large body of knowledge about all possible technologies of regime change. All revolutions of modernity left a deep scar on the consciousness of every member of the hereditary aristocracy. The traumatic experience of losing power makes the Royals take their revenge over liberals very seriously. They know exactly what they want. But only time can tell whether they know exactly how to achieve what they want.

Keeping this characteristic of the Royals in mind let’s get back to the point and ask the following question: what exactly from the report of the Club reveals that namely the Royals are involved in designing the new post-liberal regime?

First of all, there is a storm of criticism towards the liberal economy where the tertiary sector (services and financial speculations) occupies the lion’s share. It should be recalled that the old-school bourgeoisie (industrial capitalists) do not belong to the tertiary sector since they do not share liberal trends of the dematerialization of businesses. It is safe to assume that the old industrial bourgeoisie “changed their shoes” approximately in the second half of the 20th century. Now they play together with the Royals against speculative oligarchs of liberal “bubblenomics”.

The traditionalists unlikely need to reinvent the wheel regarding such criticism since everything is apparent. Only imbeciles and populists may deny a bogus framework of contemporary economics. The present financial system runs on derivatives mostly. Even if we do not understand how “bubblenomics” works, we unconsciously feel that such traditionalists’ economical constants as gold and land sound more appealing for common people than any security does. However, we should not romanticize the traditionalist elites who in the same manner as liberals worry neither about 800 million of the starving nor about 2 billion of the obese today. They merely use unbeatable arguments for effective criticism.

However, there is a certain weak point in the report: a holistic counter-liberal economic model is unavailable there. Various cases provided by the Club with regard to a possible alternative approach to both production and consumption are too parochial staying far from the desirable global scale. Besides, some pure simulacra targeted at uncritical mass consciousness are also available. For example, the projects on recycling and waste management for which the Club of Rome espouses very much belong to the sphere of control of transnational organized crime that, in its turn, is under control of the Royals through various intergovernmental channels, transnational corporations, and international funds. Just try to establish a waste treatment enterprise somewhere in the world and the international mafia will immediately explain to you that the ecology is not the business of your servile mind.

Once again we have to take an aside to explain why we consider the mafia a domain of the Royals.

First, that specific sort of people joining criminality corresponds to warriors from the caste-based perspective. The grass-roots passionate activists ready to risk their health and life for ground-based questionable values are alien to the ethos of the third estate who won in the liberal world order. They look more like the taken down “nobility of the sword” — the roaming sicarios whose inherent nonconformity prevents them from working obediently within a herd. They are the ones who can both hurt and stand the pain. And pain, as we know, is the antithesis of comfort which is the stigma and the largest value for consumer society. Such sort of people can come to mutual understanding only with the actual representatives of the warrior caste — hereditary nobles.

Second, a couple of tons of cocaine sold over-the-counter through a chain of drug dealers for pure cash can hardly reflect the business model applicable for the financial speculative establishment of liberals.

Third, a gradual convergence of supranational bureaucracy and organized crime hints at an integrated control center for both structures. When corruption of bureaucrats is a household word and drug traffic goes via diplomatic channels the forces that coordinate both processes can be found at a global level having no national borders. In today’s world, such a level is occupied by the transnational corporations whose boards of directors are full of people with names that start mostly with “Fon” and “De” — the offsprings of noble families.

Thus, using simple deductive maneuvers we can confidently figure out which one from two opposing camps — the Royals or liberals controls the mafia.

Desecularization of social relations is another hint at the end beneficiaries of a new paradigm. The “upgraded” church that can implant new synthetic values into the philistine heads perfectly fits the following strategic objectives of the Royals in the postmodern era:

1. to replace the no longer appealing scientific understanding of the world with a new sort of metaphysics made of various religions and non-traditional philosophies where the “high above-human values” should dominate without having to be rationally explained. The purely post-modernist movement “Dark Enlightenment” with its doctrine of the so-called “geo trauma” seems to be a case in point. In accordance with the doctrine, the Earth’s core got hurt badly during the evolution of the human race. To heal such a trauma, humanity should be destroyed along with all the other forms of organic life on this planet. To contest such theories with a rational mind is impossible since it is unclear from which angle such trash can be addressed at all. Remark: In the context of contemporary physics, for example, many postmodernist pseudo-scientific speculations do not look too extravagant. The very discourse where Fadeev-Popov’s ghosts (ghosts!) and superstrings are taken for granted is closer to magic than to science. Experiments conducted in CERN are unverifiable for anybody other than those who work in CERN. The large hadron collider can safely be called an instrument of post-science once everything happening around the LHC adds fuel to conspiracy theories. The Royals along with many postmodernist intellectuals see such quasi-scientific discourse as a clear sign of the readiness of mass consciousness for a transition to the next paradigmatic stage where every individual has the right to question any scientific achievement of modernity. Nonetheless, the proposed conjunction of post-science with post-religion is not a reversion to “medieval darkness”. This is another romantic promise for those who can recognize the “enlightenment of enlightenment” in the total nihilistic doubt inherent in postmodernism;
2. to prepare the ground for the cruellest spiritual dictatorship to oppress anyone who opposes a new world order in a legitimate way sanctioned by the new church. Where is the new Church, there must be the new Inquisition.

Yet another vector of discourse in the report should be recognized as a sort of camouflage — a paradoxical self-criticism that, nonetheless, can be debunked quite easily. When corporations are criticized and certain lip service is paid to national states at the same time, the audience should feel the unprejudiced selfless truth behind the discourse of intellectuals from the Club. But, as they say, if you need to hide something, put it in the place most visible. Namely, transnational corporations in a specially evolved form will come to replace the present national states. Supranational bureaucrats should substitute for the national ones, regular armies should be changed for private paramilitary organizations, national fiat currencies should give way to … but more on that later.

The national states with their supposedly stronger responsibility before citizens are praised in the report for a reason. The thing is that the national states can unlikely disappear. They will be transformed into territorial latifundia without the slightest trace of democracy. There will be the old glorious feudalism in a new digital wrapping where cannibalistic police dictatorship will be supplemented with super-efficient brainwashing via the new “hi-tech” church.

And last but not least, a remark regarding the symbolism of the Club’s name needs to be made. If it were “the Club of Washington” or, for example, “the Club of Chicago”, hesitations about who of them (liberals or the Royals) own the Club would be legitimate. The thing is that powers-that-be take symbolism very seriously. That’s why a contrario reasoning is that liberals having their headquarters in the US could unlikely name their intellectual mouthpiece after Rome.

It is worth mentioning along the line that the US, Russia, and China have no representatives among the Royals. This is not because those countries are super-liberal, but because they merely have no monarchical nobility. The US never had it since day one, both Russia and China destroyed their imperial traditions in the 20th century. The Royals mostly consist of noble families from Old Europe, Mideast, and Japan. Hereditary princes, barons, and samurai occupy top positions on the boards of directors of the leading transnational corporations as well as in the supranational bureaucracy. This fact can partially explain why the capital of the EU is neither Paris with its historical revolutionary stigmata nor Berlin with its economic power. Mediocre but still monarchy Brussels is chosen as the capital of the European Union.

Now, let’s consider the very absence of crypto in the report of the Club of Rome. Two possible versions of events with diametrically opposed backgrounds are worth reviewing in this regard.

1. Crypto originates from liberals.

If we put aside a mythical prattle about a lonely hero Satoshi Nakamoto who supposedly graced humanity with a ready-to-use technology providing phenomenal anonymity of transactions, the murky origin of Bitcoin hints at some powerful organization. The organization seems to be pretty savvy at financial, technical, and organizational aspects. It is capable of staying in the shadow for about a decade despite unprecedented data leakages in the present era of information. At a certain point in time, the organization decided to provide free access to a specific technology that potentially could bring multi-billion profits to the international financial structures if the technology were protected with exclusive copyright.

For the first time, crypto appeared in a domain of a marginalized geeky stratum whose attitude to “serious business” was quite frivolous. Later on, crypto obtained a wide application in the darknet where conventional means of payment for weapons, drugs, and hacking were not very convenient, to put it mildly.

We should place a special emphasis on this issue: the dark web, by nature, is very coherent with anti-liberal methods of doing things. Some covert forces having a clear vision for the future seem to give a hand in the creation of a hidden sector of the World Wide Web. It’s naive to think that the darknet as a virtual department of criminality appeared from somewhere by itself. It doesn’t seem that some libertarian cyber-rebels stood at the origins of the dark web as well. Of course, many rumors are available about such organizations. But from a purely time perspective, both “Anonymous” and Wikileaks are a kind of “modern replica”. That’s why there is a reasonable good-faith belief that the darknet is managed by the anti-liberal Royals.

After the first crypto traders joined the game, Bitcoin gained a certain value to be attractive enough as a tradable asset. Remark: stock speculations are the domain of liberals. With the advent of the first altcoins, speculations in thin financial air emerged. But the true blast of interest to crypto happened when Vitalik Buterin deployed Ethereum which provided a flexible platform for building a large variety of businesses tokenized through the distributed ledger technology. And after 2017 with booming ICOs, a more or less wide audience grasped the virtually-legal cryptoeconomy. It seems apparent to which modus operandi crypto belongs today — this is purebred speculative neoliberalism.

But it’s better not jump to conclusions and get back to the basics: what was the organization that managed to remain undisclosed after the first crypto was uploaded? We are still based on the assumption that it was one of the secret services of liberals (FBI, CIA, and the like). If so, the perplexity of various state structures (including the American SEC), banks, and TNCs regarding crypto was quite explainable: nobody warned them beforehand. The thing is that cryptocurrency puts the rug from under the very monopolists on manipulations with money — banks, state treasures, transnational payment systems, and the corporations that are getting fat in conjunction with the international banking system.

Is crypto advantageous for liberals? In general, it is not. Moreover, it looks like a shot in the foot. Cryptoeconomy is a phenomenon that is entering postmodernity while the liberal structures of contemporary capitalism look inadequately anachronistic. In its “non-regulated” partisan format crypto is an obvious error in the global finances. The state machinery cannot use crypto to milk the herds of plebs as it is arranged with the help of a banking system.

Bitcoin is, probably, the only civilizational phenomenon that stays immune against bureaucratic institutions of all levels. Among all other crypto assets Bitcoin occupies a unique place — the first cryptocurrency belongs to nobody. And if so, it is invulnerable in legal terms. The existing jurisprudence cannot deal with an object over which property rights (the holy grail of capitalism) do not extend.

A purely procedural problem of who to blame when there is a task to stop Bitcoin comes to a lack of a responsible party: 10 thousand nodes (computer network nodes) that serve Bitcoin’s blockchain are scattered all over the world being properties of independent subjects in terms of international law. That’s why any attempt to ban Bitcoin is impossible both technically and legally in the same manner as it is impossible to stop the whole Internet. In general, crypto moves at a high supranational level, but not in the sense of the UN bureaucracy. It lives in a field of people-to-people crypto anarchy that has nothing in common with the liberal paradigm of modernity.

But we are talking about some secret service from a liberal camp. It’s another pair of shoes. The advantages of deploying crypto seem to match the zeitgeist in such a case. The thing is that any secret service can be only conditionally called a law-abiding organization. People with wide political awareness work there. The information they regularly collect makes them address many things at an angle different from how a president along with all top-level bureaucrats sees things. Secret agents are systemic cosmopolitans having their own agenda with no limitations imposed by both national borders and local legislations.

Let’s assume that the idea of crypto arrives at analysts of our imaginary secret service when Bitcoin is just at the conceptual stage. They realize that sooner or later someone will deploy the technology and the process will come to a self-evolving mode on the Internet. In contrast to common people, the analysts do not consider the “bubblenomics” of derivatives sustainable. They realize that the global financial bubble can burst at any moment. That’s why an alternative to “bubblenomics” invulnerable from both technical and legal perspectives could induce a secret plan of operational arrangements. The arrangements imply a secret but manageable deployment of the first crypto.

We do not know which specific considerations could guide those secret agents (we repeat: this is just a thought experiment), but the simplest logical advantages of the first crypto for a liberal secret service seem the following:

1. Direct informational and operational control over the entire rapidly-evolving cryptoeconomy. Transactions in crypto are conditionally anonymous even for ordinary crypto-users, not to mention secret services who supervise such techno-giants as Facebook and Google. If the first genesis block is deployed by secret agents, the whole crypto becomes fully transparent for them. And control (especially a hidden one) is power.
2. Monitoring illegal financial streams (“black cash”) of organized crime. Since the transnational mafia is under the control of the Royals, getting access to its financial information is very valuable for any liberal secret service. It is a powerful trump card allowing secret agents to blackmail the Royals’ structures.
3. Indirect pressure on the old-school financial speculators. Even though crypto is not mature enough to be a fully-fledged system of checks and balances for the global speculative “bubblenomics”, its potential looks more positive in terms of the present paradigm shift. Besides, it is always possible to shake financial markets with the other proven techniques: fake-info injections, artificial crises, forcible bankruptcies, assassination, kidnapping, and the like.
4. Funding secret operations for which no reporting before both the Congress and taxpayers is needed. The back entrance to Fed where it is possible to print as much money as necessary is appropriate not for any occasion. “Their own” money implies a unique degree of freedom even for secret services conditioned with legal limitations not so significant.

If we accept such a version of events as a sequence of actions that really took place, no word about crypto in the report of the Club of Rome would appear reasonable. Any criticism from the Club (except, probably, blaming in speculations that are countless without cryptocurrencies, in fact) towards the crypto deployed by liberals would sound well-grounded only if concrete arguments are available. The very quality of the Club’s discourse implies deep expertise. That’s why platitudes in the style of Warren Buffett would be too risky for the experts’ reputation. At the same time, praising the cryptoeconomy would imply popularizing a tool of the ideological foe. Thus, the best approach in such a context would be to pretend that crypto is either unavailable at all or irrelevant to the objectives of the Club of Rome. It looks quite ridiculous but helps the Club’s intellectuals save face, nonetheless.

2. Crypto is a secret weapon of the Royals

The second equally possible probability brings up the question of why the Royals might need crypto if they bet on the industrial bourgeoisie, criminal black cash, and the other non-virtualized sectors. If crypto does not match the aspirations of the Royals towards the new paradigm, we would not need to say more. But the cryptoeconomy fits very well to a set of possible measures against the existing world order. Being a purely virtual phenomenon ideally fitting financial speculations, crypto paradoxically undermines the basement of the present liberal “bubblenomics”.

The key point is that crypto is independent of the world banking system. Bitcoin is an anarchistic alternative to any national currency. And if so, it shakes the foundations of a classical model of the national state. In such a context, Bitcoin is antisocial. But this is not about hurting people, this is about destroying the credibility of vertical hierarchies of power in the national state. The new paradigm, where the Royals are planning to occupy the top positions, implies hyper-globalism which reduces the influence of national governments, blurs national borders, and helps concentrate power in hands of supranational structures. That’s why crypto is a Trojan horse for the speculative economics of liberals. And logic suggests that the Trojan horse was built in the camp opposite to liberals.

If we consider special cases when crypto can be useful for the Royals, the arguments can coincide with the ones that liberals have but with negative connotations. Crypto can be quite securely and anonymously used by the criminal structures staying under control of the Royals for illegal transactions, bribes, and tax evasion. In addition, crypto can bring speculative financial schemes to the next level where they, on the one hand, distance from the old-school derivative bubbles of liberals and, on the other hand, introduce users to the decentralized cryptoeconomy.

With the same success, transnational corporations can hook up their customers for payments in crypto. Many digital products and services can catch the second wind if their payment options include crypto. It is still not applicable for the “classical’’ corporative stuff, but the digital behemoths are hinting at such a methodology clearly: Facebook’s Libra, Telegram’s Gram, and few other cryptocoins from the other giants (Amazon, Google) are under enhanced development now. Providing payments in “their own’’ currencies many corporations can untie their business from the anchor of the Fed. Such a degree of freedom is worth investments if global economics beyond national borders is the priority.

Crypto can also facilitate some political issues for the Royals. Take Japan, for example. The old monarchy appeared a servant of liberals after WW2. But the Japanese government has legalized transactions in crypto recently. This is the first and only case among the leading industrial economies today. Doesn’t the fact hint at the covert attempts of the Royals to weaken American dominance over the land of the rising sun?

From a wider perspective, crypto is bending a deadly rotten tooth of obsolete capitalism through the implementation of decentralized financial streams into the globalist agenda. Numerous innovative types of business breaking stereotypes and old-fashioned models of both production and consumption are emerging day after day. And if so, crypto can provide the Royals with powerful tools of influence in those domains where liberals still dominate. In terms of the far-reaching strategy, crypto corresponds to the Royals’ plans for the future much better than to the tactical goals of liberals. Hence, the assumption that crypto is a hidden weapon of the Royals sounds even more persuasive.

And again we wonder: if crypto is so useful for the Royals, why does the Club of Rome keep silent about it? Probably, just because crypto corresponds to the Royals’ agenda so well they prefer not to focus the public attention on this issue. To put it simply the Club’s intellectuals do not want to blurt things out. Showing deep expertise in cryptoeconomy (this is exactly what the audience always expects from a think tank of such a level) would make everybody realize where crypto has its roots. In such a case, the Royals would have to defend themselves from irrelevant criticism that many influential entities could throw at the Club. The very fact of defense would affect both the reputation of the Club of Rome and a cute image of nobility in the public eyes.

As we see, the second version of the origin of crypto also brings risks to the Club of Rome if they let crypto discourse appear in their reports. It is not yet time to discuss crypto publicly at the level of world elites. Crypto as the preimage of the future decentralized economy remains too toxic for the current paradigm of “partial sub-globalism”.

The crypto discourse existing in the media is nothing but Brownian motion having no clear leaders in explanations. Indeed, widely interpreted pointlessness can be called the background of the present civilizational crisis. Even if the crisis is considered with positive connotations as a sign of the upcoming recovery, the search for answers usually falls on the shoulders of various intellectual aggregators. That’s why taking responsibility for the harmonization of diverse ideas about crypto is obviously not about the Club of Rome.

As for such famous crypto-gurus as, for example, Vitalik Buterin and Naval Ravikant, they jumped on this train on the move. Now, they deliver very talented “improvisations on a theme”: various insights about the present state of affairs in cryptoeconomy along with tech epiphanies for the future crypto trends. However, they unlikely can provide an exhaustive investigation of the roots of Bitcoin in terms of its ontology, not to mention a broad picture of socio-philosophical prerequisites of cryptoeconomy in general. Such a task is far beyond the caliber of all available crypto practitioners, unfortunately.

The problem is compounded by the assumption that the origin of crypto is not limited to the above-mentioned versions. What if crypto was created by neither liberals nor the Royals? What if some third party with its own agenda uses crypto to solve its own specific problems? And they have nothing in common with neither outgoing liberal modernity nor upcoming traditionalist postmodernity. How about Russian trolls or Chinese crypto miners? Too fanciful? But what is not fanciful in the current mess about crypto?

As long as the true origin of Bitcoin remains unclear, all possible assumptions about objectives, interested parties, end beneficiaries, and control structures of crypto are equally probable.

And if so, we can rightfully propose yet another hypothesis about the origin of crypto. Brushing aside all conspiracy theories we can recognize crypto as a natural stage of the development of such a technogenic process as the internet. The internet is not a phenomenon actually. This is a dynamic process of removing knowledge from the real world to virtuality. That’s why figuring out who exactly is a real inventor of crypto does not matter much. The more important thing is to comprehend why crypto appears in demand. Such straightforward answers as “because crypto is convenient” explain nothing. It is just a statement of fact.

Crypto occurs a palliative of the financial relationships between individuals who appear in a paradigm shift from the outdated modern-age society to the postmodern post-society. The present crypto is palliative because it is still too infant to be a fully-fledged substitute for the existing monetary exchange. Cryptoeconomy is developing in parallel with the emerging post-economy where traditional financial institutions are bound to decline. Crypto is the first wake-up call for the global banking system that in itself implies another sort of collective identity against which postmodernism is waging war.

Hyper-individualism is a key feature of the future post-humans. Any collective identity won’t play a role for them. Once postmodernism is an anti-system movement per se, such traditional hierarchies as the banking system should disappear following the very postmodern logic. A peer-to-peer mode of interactions is to be a must-have feature for the highly-networked horizontal post-society. The internet has already provided users with such a mode of interactions in communication (completely) and in shopping (partially). The next frontier is in finance. Crypto demonstrates in which direction we should move to transform the current system-to-user interactions into the desirable user-to-user ones.

Obviously, the present state of the cryptoeconomy is far from the final solution because humanity is still on the way. Some current attempts to incorporate crypto into the existing financial system in the form of centralized crypto assets (interbank cryptocurrency XRP, Facebook’s Libra, Crypto-RMB, etc) reflects nothing but growing pains. Any centralized crypto is just a grotesque caricature of future money. It contradicts the very principle of post-finance where decentralization of means of payment is a core feature. Such simulacra will gradually fade away being irrelevant to the objectives of the postmodern world.

Can the world elites recognize the way of civilizational evolution? Undoubtedly, they can. Moreover, many true postmodernist visionaries belong to the elite stratum. They are engraving the grooves through which our mass consciousness starts draining from the present vertical social hierarchies to the future horizontal cyber-democracy.

Do members of the Club of Rome realize the civilizational tectonic movement happening under the little ripple of cryptoeconomy? Most probably, they do. And, perhaps, such awareness makes them keep silent about the most sensitive topics among which crypto is a famous slippery slope. Is it a manifestation of arrogance and intellectual chauvinism inherent in the elitarian think tank? Maybe so, but that’s another story.