Crypto-Colonialism

Discussion

HITO STEYERL:

"The Harvard anthropologist Michael Herzfeld coined the term crypto-colonialism to describe territories that are not colonies in the standard definition of the word, but suffer more indirect forms of oppression. Herzfeld wrote of ‘the curious alchemy’ whereby certain countries—he mentioned Greece and Thailand—‘were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence’, this relationship being articulated in the ‘iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models.’ Such countries were and are living paradoxes: ‘they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence.’

Herzfeld wrote these lines long before Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin. But his approach may help to illuminate some of the deeper roots of the Worldcoin phenomenon, for ‘crypto-colonialism’ neatly maps the geopolitical relations that underlie the data thefts and cryptoscams carried out by ai corporations. The Worldcoin example connects two technologies, ai and blockchain, whose origins are quite distinct, though both have been subjects of techno-hype. A cryptocraze took off in 2021, during the pandemic lockdowns, fuelled in part by young American white-collar workers gambling their furlough cheques in online investment. In 2022, just as this bubble crashed, the exponential spread of generative machine-learning applications created another wave of tech speculation. Another year on, and multisystemic crises—wars, climate change, inflation, energy impasses, inequality—are interwoven with hype around llm-powered chatbots, image-generation tools and, most recently, boardroom drama at Openai, where Altman and the staff saw off an attempted coup by another board faction.

In the Worldcoin project, machine-learning and blockchain technologies come together in peculiar new ways."

(https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii144/articles/hito-steyerl-common-sensing)