298. The Libertarian Roots of Cryptocurrency feat. Finn Brunton

If you start to dig into the origin story of cryptocurrency, don’t be surprised if you find the ideas and values of the American Libertarian movement all over it. 

Finn Brunton teaches science and technology studies at UC Davis and is fascinated by the historical narratives and subcultures behind modern technology. His books include Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency and Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Infrastructures). 

Finn and Greg discuss how spammers and scammers were actually some of the earliest adopters of cryptocurrency, the American Libertarian roots in the movement, and the dark future cryptocurrency pioneers worried about.  

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Cryptographic algorithms as a weapons of war

39:50: Cryptographic algorithms were classified as munitions, as weapons of war. Like you needed a foreign export license for them in the same way you would if you were selling tanks or something. So, as people were figuring out these sort of cryptographic primitives and fundamental algorithms and things like that, they started doing stuff like getting them printed on t-shirts because then you could be like, if I wear this t-shirt on an overseas flight, I am doing the equivalent of selling crates of AK-47s. And most famously, people got this extremely laconic version of this algorithm in a programming language called “perl” tattooed on themselves. And then you could say, my body is classified as a deadly weapon. You know, it's like this military device. So that tension, I think, is a really good tension for us to bear in mind as we look at how cryptocurrencies developed because part of their heritage was this awareness that strong civilian cryptography was seen as posing a genuine threat to the safety and security of the state.

American libertarianism as an ideological strain of the history of cryptocurrency

09:08: All of these different agendas for what technology should do represent different threads in libertarian, ideological ideas about what money should be and how society should operate. So that's part of what makes it so fascinating—that it's this new technology.

What crypto as a whole shows

10:01: To get certain kinds of technologies off the ground ,you can't just build the tech. You have to tell people about the future in which the tech is going to do something of value for them. And that kind of storytelling that media work is for me, where the rubber meets the road of these new technological ideas. And I saw both of them in crypto.

On the value of science and technology studies

01:01:05: What STS (Science and Technology Studies) provided was a space where all of these different areas, which are all adjacent, could have like a common center in the Venn diagram to meet up and hang out there, and part of what I love is that it gives you a passport to go and meet and learn from really interesting people in all kinds of different zones.

Show Links:Recommended Resources:

• Gadsden Flag
• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information by Andy Greenberg
• Enigma Machine
• Extropianism

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Davis

His Work:

• Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Infrastructures)
• Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency