Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a
senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency
Initiative.
Let’s talk about bitcoin, toxicity and inclusiveness.
(Boy, my Twitter feed is going to have fun over the next few days.)
To start with, let me take a position: I stand with those people,
especially women, who’ve lately been calling out maltreatment from
members of the bitcoin community and citing rude and abusive behavior as
proof of that community’s lack of inclusiveness. These are people who
believe in cryptocurrency technology’s potential but feel discouraged to
believe that they belong to the community’s dominant white-male
subculture. If this technology is to fulfill its global potential, the
community associated with it must confront this problem.
But the real point of this column is not to just defend these
critics. It’s to debunk one of the more common positions adopted by
those who take issue with their complaints, particularly on Twitter. In
doing so, I hope to emphasize just how important the concepts of
“community” and “culture” are to the healthy development of crypto
technology and the ecosystem growing around it.
Hammer culture?
The line that’s most often thrown back at those calling out
incivility is that bitcoin is nothing more than a technology, a tool,
and that it’s meaningless to attach to it value judgments relating to
human behavior. Bitcoin is amoral, apolitical and a-cultural, the
argument goes, and like any technology it is used by good and bad people
alike.
These pundits, warning of a political correctness-based threat to
free speech, will then advise the injured party to take issue directly
with the bad actors but refrain from agitating for community-wide
change.
A perfect example of the genre came from outspoken lawyer Preston Byrne.
Clever, yes. But it’s extremely unhelpful, because the examples given do not share equivalent terms of reference.
Byrne’s “hammer” refers solely to the steel implement that tradesmen
use. By contrast, people complaining about “bitcoin” are clearly using
the word in a much wider context than in merely a reference to the code,
to the ones and zeros that comprise the bitcoin protocol. They are
inherently talking about the wider ecosystem and community gathered
around the idea of bitcoin.
So, let’s equalize the terms, shall we? We can turn each of these nouns into a modifier of the word “community.”
While it might sound silly to talk about a “hammer community,” there
may well be groups of hammer-obsessed souls who debate questions of
design and ease of use at meetups and in chat rooms. If so, I’m going to
guess that that community would probably also be predominantly male.
But the real issue is that such a hammer community is going to be far
less important to the future design and evolution of hammer technology
than bitcoin’s community is to its. I’m no expert, but I don’t see a
great deal of change in hammer technology having occurred over the
centuries and I’m not sure people expect much in the future. As such, we
don’t see much jockeying among users to ensure that proposals for
hammer upgrades are implemented and standardized to their preferred
design.
By contrast, the open-source technology behind bitcoin is in a
constant state of evolution. It is, by definition, under development,
which is why we talk about the engineers who work on it as “developers,”
not “custodians.” As such, there is a constant battle of interests over
who gets to modify the code. Exhibit A: the block-size debate.
Counter-arguing that those who don’t like the process can just fork
the code, as the large-blockers did, and set up their own new community,
doesn’t cut it for me. Bitcoin is the brand that matters. Any newcomer
will struggle to achieve the same network effects. Secession just isn’t
viable for anyone who likes its current design but doesn’t like how its
future is being defined.
Also, is there a “hammer ecosystem?” Maybe. But beyond producers of
nails, and perhaps steel and rubber or wood suppliers, you can hardly
call it a complex ecosystem.
Bitcoin, by contrast, which purports to reinvent the global system of
money, has attracted an inherently vast array of different technology
providers, all of whom have competing interests in how it is designed,
managed and marketed to the world. I’m not just talking about businesses
applications built on top of it, but also the developers of related
encryption, payment channel, smart contract and other vitally important
technologies, all of which are themselves in a constant state of flux.
(I’m guessing that the exhibition halls at hammer conventions don’t
have quite the same spread of offerings as cryptocurrency events such as
Consensus.)
Saying that bitcoin is nothing but a tool, is like saying that music
is nothing but a system for ordering different audible tones.
Money = community
When Paul Vigna and I wrote The Age of Cryptocurrency, we spent a lot
of time chronicling the emergence of the community that had formed
around bitcoin, which we saw as fundamental to its success. It struck us
that the notion of a bitcoin community was so prominent — the “c” word
was always being bandied about — because bitcoin embodied a profound and
sweeping social idea. It offered nothing less than a reinvention
of money, a revolution in the entire system for coordinating human
value exchange.
Money only works to the extent that there is widespread belief in it,
that people buy into its core myth. Money, Felix Martin says, is a social technology,
by which he means that its functionality and usability depend far less
on the physical qualities of the token that represents it than on the
collective agreement among large communities of people that their
token captures, represents and communicates transferable value. This is
true whether we’re talking about gold, dollar bills, entries in a bank
account, or cryptocurrency.
By extension, then, for any form of money to succeed, it must sustain a vibrant, growing community.
Communities = culture
The thing about communities is that they inevitably develop cultures.
In self-defining their boundaries of belonging, they develop shared
ways of seeing and language — akin to a kind of social protocol – that
regulate (in a very unofficial, and quite subconscious way) their
members’ behavior.
As they evolve, cultures can become more or less open, more or less
inclusive, more or less abrasive in their treatment of outsiders. And
inevitably, these cultural features will either encourage or impede the
growth of the community.
All this should hardly be a revelation. Anthropology, the study of
culture, is a globally widespread and influential field (one that is now
appropriately turning its attention to cryptocurrency communities.)
Studies of U.S. culture, from Alexis de Tocqueville down, have
rightly pointed to the inclusiveness of the founding fathers’ ideas as a
key driver of its economic expansion. In fact, American culture is
arguably its most important ingredient for success, a social
manifestation of Joseph Nye’s notion of the United States’ “soft power.”
So, yes, bitcoin culture really, really matters. If the compelling
ideas behind permissionless, peer-to-peer exchange and
censorship-resistant money that attract people of all stripes to it are
to retain those people’s interest and grow in influence, the bitcoin
community needs to evolve a more inclusive culture.
The only way to do that is to spur the kind of open debates that have
always driven the progress of human culture — those which shifted norms
and mores to the point that it became unacceptable to own slaves, to
spit in public, or to jump a queue.
So, listen up, bitcoin. It’s time to confront your toxicity.
Hazard drums image via Shutterstock
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