Review: "The Politics of Bitcoin" Offers a Flawed and Misleading Partisan View

David Golumbia, Associate in Nursing professor within the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Associate in Nursing aspiring political student, and therefore the author of the recently printed book, The Politics of Bitcoin: package as rightist ideology, denounces Bitcoin in a very recent diary post titled Trump, Clinton, and therefore the Electoral Politics of Bitcoin.

“[What] considerations Pine Tree State regarding Bitcoin is however it contributes to the unfold of deeply rightist ideas in economic science and political philosophy while not those rightist associations being created in the least express,” says Golumbia, adding that the liberty and democratisation offered by distributed ledger technology, able to resist interference by central authorities, are literally extreme rightist ideas.

It is, of course, unhappy and distressful to appreciate that aspirations to freedom ar seen as rightist ideology by bound sectors of latest “culture.” Golumbia’s book is promoted as “new scholarship” by the publisher — if that’s new scholarship, I’ll take old school authentic scholarship anytime.

According to Golumbia, the politics of Bitcoin and therefore the blockchain ar crossed  with this U.S. presidential election. “There is definitely a good quantity of support for Trump among Bitcoin enthusiasts,” says Golumbia. “I do assume that there ar connections between Bitcoin and Trump.”

And wherever ar those alleged connections? Throughout the colourful, artistic web communities that fuel the event and preparation of distributed ledgers, along side several of the empowering technologies that ar rising, consistent with Golumbia.

“[The] varieties of false, angry, other-targeting ideologies on that the Trump development depends may be without delay found all told the varieties of on-line communities that make and promote the scary vary of rightist political action we tend to see all over nowadays,” says Golumbia within the diary post. “We ought to be terribly distressed regarding Trump, and that we ought to be distressed regarding however Bitcoin and different components of on-line discourse feed the hate and studied content that build numerous folks support him.”

The book doesn’t mention Trump, however is express in inculpative the philosopher (or cyber-Libertarian) aspiration to private autonomy, self-ownership and freedom — the maximum amount freedom as potential — from the ability, greed and management freakery of bold central authorities.

“[In] the name of [Bitcoin], extremist ideas were gaining much more traction than they antecedently had outside of the extremist literature to that that they had mostly been confined,” says the author. “These ideas don't seem to be merely unorthodox or contrarian: they're items of a holistic worldview that are deliberately developed and publicised by rightist ideologues.”

This is to not say that Golumbia’s book isn’t well written. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of false belief that fastidiously builds up subtly created distortions of straightforward ideas like “freedom” and “control,” within the hope of persuading the reader that real freedom will solely come back from a “benevolent” massive Brother that controls every and each facet of life from the cradle to the grave. Sounds absurd? certain it's, like those funny mathematical “demonstrations” that  prove one equals zero.

Of course, one can’t assume that each one readers ar stupid and all unaware of facts. Therefore, Golumbia is forced to concede that not all Bitcoin enthusiasts ar extreme right-wingers. “I am generally asked to account for Bitcoin enthusiasm among those with expressly leftist politics,” he acknowledges within the book. however Golumbia finds it exhausting to envision however the “minority” of non-right-wing Bitcoin enthusiasts will resist “the political values that ar terribly virtually coded into the package itself.”

In the post, Golumbia vents his frustration at the growing Bitcoin enthusiasm from the thought left. within the video of the property session at the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton world Initiative 2016 conference, 2 speakers — former special assistant to President Obama, Jamie Smith, currently world Chief Communications Officer of the Bitfury cluster, and Peruvian economic expert, Hernando First State Soto — remark “the tantalizing way forward for the blockchain” (around minute 32). Golumbia looks particularly upset that First State Soto is praised not solely by Saint George H.W. Bush and Ronald Wilson Reagan, however conjointly by Hillary and United States President (who known as First State Soto “the world’s greatest living economic expert,”) and denounces the Clintons as “left neoliberals.” a part of Golumbia’s full-on attack is predicated on “how simply and the way transparently [Bitcoin] fits into the shift toward the correct we tend to see in numerous places nowadays.”

In a Twitter exchange with another political student, with whom this author has had several disagreements and intense exchanges over the years, Golumbia extends his condemnation to all or any kinds of rising, troubled and empowering technologies. It’s troublesome to flee the conclusion that Golumbia’s opposition to Bitcoin and its associated technologies has its roots in a very create by mental act and imperfect partisan position.



source : https://bitcoinmagazine.com