What connects crypto and ‘Love is Blind’?

The sociology of speculation and how it is shaping crypto communities and modern life.

Hi, and welcome back to Untangled. Last month I wrote about how Venture Capitalists are becoming the narrators of crypto, and why that’s a big problem. Then I created an audio version of that same essay because, as it turns out, people like hearing me read things. 🤷‍♂️

This month I’ve written about how speculation is shaping crypto culture, reality television, and all of us. If you like it, don’t keep me a secret, okay?

Before getting into it, a few gifts from members of the Untangled community:

• Alex Kantrowitz hosted former co-founder and CEO of CrowdTangle Brandon Silverman on The Big Technology Podcast. It’s a nuanced and entertaining conversation that speaks to a number of the issues I raised in “Some Unsatisfying Solutions for Facebook.” Most importantly, they both subscribe to Untangled! 🙃

• Chris Riley, R Street Institute senior fellow (and fellow Untangled reader!) partnered with Richard Reisman to outline a new vision for the internet in Tech Policy Press. Along the way, they draw on my very first essay, “Crypto is not decentralized.” Cool, huh?

Got something you want to share, like an upcoming event or an essay you recently published? Don’t be shy - send it my way.

Now on to the show!

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Ever wondered what connects crypto and the Netflix show Love is Blind? Me too! All the damn time. See, how technology impacts society isn’t just dictated from on high by its narrators, it’s also shaped from the bottom up by a swirl of beliefs, practices, and rituals that compose the culture of a community. And I think there is a common characteristic — a belief and an action wrapped in one — that is shaping the cultures of crypto, shows like Love is Blind, and each of us: speculation. Let’s dig in.

My sister often lovingly nudges me to make sure I answer the question “uh, why does this matter?” in each essay I write. Well, buckle up, Emily, because sociologist Lana Swartz thinks we might be moving toward a world where money is “unlinked from political and territorial structures of nationhood.” 😮 In Swartz’s great new book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media, she argues that communities form around money technologies and the kind of transactions they facilitate.

Before states issued paper money, the wealthy used bills and the poor used bronze or copper coins. Communities were not unified around money — they were stratified. This all changed with the introduction of state-based currency. As Swartz argues, the use of state-issued paper money “unified these classes into an economic polity with a ‘common economic language’ whose members would, at least, do business with each other, engage in commerce if not always conversation.”

State-issued money contributed to shared narratives in the same way that print media, novels, and newspapers did — it enabled communities who had never met one another to create an “imagined community” to use political scientist Benedict Anderson’s phrase. In the U.S., the dollar affirmed a kind of national identity, and using it became an inclusive ritual of citizenship.

But it’s possible this is all about to change again: Swartz writes that we’re currently undergoing a shift from “mass money media” to “social media money.” This shift is the result of the decrease in trust in government and political institutions and the corollary rise of new money technologies, like cryptocurrencies and fintech. She writes: “We may indeed be hurtling toward a future of money in which states do not have a monopoly on the means of exchange.”

So, what beliefs, practices, and rituals will come to define these communities? We can start theorizing by thinking along axes to form typologies. One axis is ideological and captures the extent to which the deeply held beliefs of community members — political beliefs or technocratic — shape the community.

Another relevant axis has to do with power — do community norms and practices of governance concentrate or distribute power (e.g. voting, decision-making, token distribution, etc.)?

Now we have a nice little graph we can use to analyze the cultures of different communities.

I’m using the gini-coefficient, which measures wealth inequality, as an imperfect proxy for the distribution of power in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

There are surely other axes worth consideration — what comes to mind for you? Hit reply and let me know.

After reading “Speculative Communities: Living With Uncertainty in a Financialized World” by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, I’m convinced that speculation will come to shape each crypto community in a more fundamental way. A speculator is someone who embraces or benefits from radical uncertainty. In their view, uncertainty isn’t to be avoided but accepted as a precondition of possibility — and this is exactly what contestants in Love is Blind are doing. They are embracing uncertainty in order to speculate on a better future for themselves!

I see the speculative mindset everywhere. That might sound odd, so let me make it personal: these days, do you feel like a rational agent making calculated decisions, saving, and investing now to benefit your future self? Right, me neither. This is John Stuart Mill’s idea of homo economicus — that we are rational actors when making decisions about the future. Komporozos-Athanasiou thinks we’re evolving to be homo speculans, “a politically disoriented, speculative subject who accepts rather than averts the future’s radical uncertainty.” Yeah, that sounds more like it!

According to Komporozos-Athanasiou, the financial logic of speculation is seeping into modern life. Take politics — votes for Trump or Brexit can be seen as speculative wagers on an unlikely but possible outcome; they reflect an embrace of volatility or radical uncertainty. But speculation is not experienced individually — instead, we engage in “speculative communities,” or those in which:

“social bonds are defined by a speculative engagement with the future and a connection with others on the basis of shared experiences of volatility and precarity. Speculative communities are based on a collective, mutual recognition of contemporary society’s fragility in the face of radical uncertainties across all spheres of life […] Speculation absolves uncertainty by breathing new life into social groups that have suffered loss of certainty, security, and stability, thus re-enchanting collectivities.”

Yes, crypto is fundamentally about speculating on the value of future assets, and yes people do this in social groups, but the connections between crypto and ‘speculative communities’ run deeper than that. The narratives of crypto offer a sense of stability amidst speculation. Take these three:

• ‘Decentralization’ can be juxtaposed against Big Tech and Big Government and framed as ‘disruptive’ but it ultimately expresses a desire for control and security; that you can secure your own money free from dependencies and intermediaries (even if that’s not quite true!).

• ‘Immutability’ might be seen as the key unlock to ‘digital ownership’ but it’s ultimately about the promise of permanence; that things won’t change; that we can control change.

• Read one way, ‘it’s early’ represents a belief in the future value of crypto. But read through Komporozos-Athanasiou’s framework, it’s a “stabilizing narrative” that enables people to engage in speculative actions amidst uncertainty.

Then there are what Komporozos-Athanasiou calls “speculative technologies.” He’s talking about algorithmic systems and makes the point that:

“the industry’s greatest strength lies in its successful embedding of uncertainty within its complex and opaque platforms — in the ways it reaps profits from the confusion sowed by its algorithms. It is in fact uncertainty itself that becomes a lucrative resource of monetization, much as in the algorithmic wagers of high-frequency traders.”

Speculative technology comes in all shapes and sizes. On Crypto Twitter you’ll find it in the form of financial charts and on-chain analysis. Charts try to predict the future price of a cryptocurrency. But they’re more than that — they are a ritual; a practice that builds community and helps its members navigate the vicissitudes of the market. On-chain analysis promises insight into what’s happening at the moment. But seeing doesn’t equal knowing. Data can be ‘transparent’ but system dynamics are often hidden from view. This hits on the other element of speculative technologies, namely that they have the “capacity to both hypervisualize and obfuscate,” to represent the complexity of reality and hide it.

Inequality thrives in this context. Komporozos-Athanasiou argues that “the glass house’s technological obscurity often masks new forms of inequality and exploitation, predicated on people’s differential powers of seeing: while some are able to navigate darkness effortlessly without a flashlight, others are paralyzed and forced to stand still.” You could see this play out in the recent collapse, as powerful players who presumably could see more of the ecosystem than others sold their tokens before retail investors. This inequality isn’t simply an artifact of speculative technologies’ ability to obfuscate, but speculation more broadly. As anthropologist Laura Bear notes, “our ability to accumulate capital from speculation is unevenly distributed in relation to intersecting inequalities of class, race, ethnicity, and gender.”

Another thing that thrives in this speculative context? You guessed it: shows like Love is Blind. Komporozos-Athanasiou views the show as “a testing ground of speculative intimacies, capturing something of modern desire’s inherent volatility.” It’s not simply that volatility and uncertainty influence the couple, but they shape the audience’s experience too, leading Komporozos-Athanasiou to wonder what all of us yell at the television think: “Why wait until the wedding day to voice doubt explicitly? Are these even real exchanges or staged performances?”

It’s easy to make fun of crypto and the people who participate in it. They do and say pretty dumb things sometimes. And they often do it with an attitude that is not great. But I think that we’re too quick to dismiss the rise of these communities — not because they’re going to change the world in all the ways they espouse. But because they can tell us something about how the world is already changing. If Swartz and Komporozos-Athanasiou are right, there are big shifts taking place beneath our feet, nudging us toward more fragmented and speculative lives. Want to know what happens next? Watch this space (and Love is Blind!)

Thank you to Georgia Iacovou, my editor