Cryptocracy and Its Discontents

Brett Scott is a campaigner, monetary anthropologist and former broker. He is the author of The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money and Cloudmoney: Why the War on Cash Endangers Our Freedom. Brett has appeared in a wide range of TV shows, radio broadcasts and documentaries, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired Magazine and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. His Twitter is @suitpossum

Excerpt from our discussion: “One of the things I'm interested in right now in terms of the underlying ideologies or the seeming inconsistencies between them is something I was calling in my last piece, "fractal libertarianism." Again, I'm still unsure about this, but if you look at the underlying image in a libertarian worldview—which is a native cosmology in capitalism anyway—it’s of the solo islands, right? Each man is an island. This is the division that Margaret Thatcher put out: "There is no society, there are only individual men and women."

This is the underlying classical liberal concept of the social contract. You have a bunch of solo individuals, and they recognize through their solo rationality that they can come closer together into proximity to form social relations—but it has to be in their interest to do so. This is how social contract theorists like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke used this argument to attack monarchs. They argued that all the individuals who come together to form the body of the state should have individual rights because they could choose to dissolve society if they wanted to.

That’s the starting point. This is how economists imagine markets.