Fiona Allon. Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 33, Issue 96, June 2018.
Introduction
In Lionel Shriver’s novel The Mandibles (2016a), set in a not-too-distant future as the American economy teeters on the brink of a spectacular crash, the United States government orders that all gold reserves, even wedding rings, be recalled and forfeited to the government. It is 2029, the dollar has collapsed, Treasury Bonds are worthless, and a new Russian-Chinese-backed international reserve currency, the ‘Bancor’, has appeared. In a muddled attempt to regain some monetary control, the Federal Reserve announces its plan to nationalise the country’s gold reserves: the hoarding of gold is prohibited and house searches are conducted regularly by order of the fiscally incompetent, debt-ridden and increasingly authoritarian Federal Government.
Shriver rehearses many familiar aspects of the Great Depression in her account of the imagined catastrophic downturn – hyperinflation, debt default, home foreclosures, widespread unemployment and impoverishment – so it is no surprise that gold hoarding also appears. On 5 April 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 of the Emergency Banking Act, making it illegal for citizens to hoard ‘monetary gold’ – coins or bullion – which now had to be sold to the federal government. Furthermore, in addition to acquiring the gold held by private citizens, Roosevelt also issued the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which took the United States off the domestic gold standard. These interventions are etched in the collective memory of libertarians as an example of the invidious power of central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the inherent violence of the fiat money system itself (fiat after all, it should be remembered, derives from Latin ‘let it be done’, a command achieved by force or decree).
Gold has a central place in libertarian history and Shriver has made no secret of her libertarian politics. Many libertarians, both on the left and the right, continue to advocate a return to the gold standard, gold having become especially important in the wake of the financial crisis as the symbol of the inherent value and monetary stability that have purportedly been lost due to the speculative excesses of the financial system. Comparisons with gold have also been a recurrent feature of debates around new cryptocurrencies and the mathematically-based certainty they promise. Bitcoin itself is routinely referred to as ‘digital gold’ (Popper 2015), and an explicit metallism underpins its technical design, its deflationary logic of finite supply, and its libertarian claims to intrinsic value (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 2013; Dodd 2018; Swartz 2018). Perhaps it is no coincidence that 5 April 1975 is the birthdate listed on the online personal profile for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the individual or perhaps group of developers that posted the initial proposal for Bitcoin (Brunton 2017). For Nakamoto (2008), money (just like information) should be free to circulate without the heavy hand of government or manipulation by questionable, even corrupt, financial institutions. Divesting banks of their monopoly on the creation of money is a key part of this agenda. Bitcoin was one of the first cryptocurrencies to gain public attention and is now considered a ‘household name’ but it is just one of many alternative currencies that exist alongside the mainstream banking system, as new cryptocurrencies emerge almost daily.
The Mandibles has been called ‘dystopian finance fiction’ (Franklin 2016): a genre of writing that has become prominent since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. It shares this origin with Bitcoin, for it was in 2008 that Satoshi Nakamoto published the ‘white paper’ that outlined the decentralised, peer-to-peer payments network. If the financial crisis triggered widespread distrust of the state, the founders of Bitcoin extended this distrust to all centralised authorities, becoming, in effect, the guiding principle of the stateless electronic currency (Jeong 2013; Swartz 2018). Instead of a central bank, a clearinghouse, or an intermediary of any kind, Bitcoin celebrated the radical autonomy of the individual enabled by digital network technology, open-source software and cryptographic authentication: ‘With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank.’ Debates about the future of money have certainly intensified since the financial crisis, motivated in large part by interest in alternatives to state-issued money backed by sovereign nations. In a post-Bretton Woods world, where financial derivatives now perform the work of ‘anchoring’ global finance in the way that gold once did (Bryan and Rafferty 2006), where the money system has dematerialised and become self-referential, where there are payment systems which require no physical money tokens, and where the metallic coins in our pockets remind us of a materiality that is progressively anachronistic and redundant, definitions of what money is and can do are up for grabs (Adkins 2015). Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) underlying Bitcoin, has become the most recent technological innovation for ‘hacking the future of money’ (Scott 2013). And it has attracted some big claims: ‘For the first time in human history, we have a register that does not need to be underwritten by some form of authority or state power, other than itself … It’s banking without banks, and money without money’ (Lanchester 2016, 5).
Blockchain’s potential to destabilise the centralised infrastructures of the monetary system seems to be in little doubt, with some predicting transformative implications for payments, banks, the financial system and society more broadly (Swan 2015; Macrobusiness 2017). Indeed, the blockchain is widely viewed as the precursor of a new ‘smart social contract’, a form of ‘distributed democracy’ that fundamentally changes the traditional relationships between government and citizens (Government Office for Science 2015; Holmes 2017, 9). It is no surprise that interest in the technology’s gender possibilities is also growing, on issues as diverse as gender bias, wage equality, financial inclusion, alternative community formations, and self-determination beyond the reach of the state. For Aysgarth (2016), for example, the pseudonymity of the blockchain should be regarded as a ‘feminist weapon’, a way to challenge patriarchal norms and eliminate conscious or unconscious gender bias. The blockchain may provide the basis for a new democratic infrastructure, where, supported by algorithmic technologies, individuals are empowered to self-organise. Enhanced freedoms to exchange value directly between two parties may also mean that personal characteristics such as gender, race, skin colour and sexual orientation are irrelevant for establishing one’s transactional credentials. Rather than being mediated by the state, aggregated at the level of the nation and centralised by a cumbersome, self-serving bureaucracy, individual cryptographic identity becomes the new money (Birch 2014), and also the basis for a whole suite of restructured social, political and financial transactions. But what happens to the intransigence of intersectional factors such as class, race and gender in the production of subjectivity and in systems of power, the stubborn persistence of power relations – the very stuff, in other words, that has long been the ground of feminist analysis and politics? The assumption of the blockchain protocol is that the difficult complications of human sociality can effectively be made to disappear, replaced by the technological fix of consensus algorithms (O’Dwyer 2017).
The recent past of Bitcoin suggests that caution around blockchain techno-utopianism is needed, especially given the anarcho-capitalist competition that was foundational to the design of the cryptocurrency – where users are incentivised to compete against each other as evidence of ‘proof-of-work’ – and which once again characterises the jostling, emergent space of initial coin offerings. This includes the greed and selfishness associated with Bitcoin and other kinds of crypto-capitalism, but also the more insidious forms of ‘crypto-patriarchy’ (Scott 2014) that have become equally widespread. For not only is the cryptocurrency space overwhelmingly male-dominated, there is also a freewheeling hyperindividualism that is couched in the libertarian fantasy of non-negotiable and essentialist gender, racial, social and monetary identity. Or will the future be different this time? Can other sets of values underpin cryptocurrencies beyond those encoded in the Bitcoin protocol? (Terranova and Fumagalli 2015). How can differently organised collectives and communities engage with cryptocurrencies and blockchain more broadly? What do these developments signal for feminist engagements with the money economy? Does the dissolution of standardised monetary forms automatically open on to more progressive, feminist futures? Are molecular (as opposed to molar) narratives of money always the best ones for feminism to embrace? (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2013). In a context where the extreme right in the US is ascendant and where anti-government and anti-state rhetoric is commonplace rather than radical, what kind of political purchase does the distributed, decentralised mode of organisation created by blockchain technology actually achieve?
In Family Values, Melinda Cooper argues that the ‘history of economic formations cannot be prised apart from the operations of gender, race, and sexuality without obscuring the politics of wealth and income distribution itself’ (2017, 24). In other words, monetary relations are always social/sexual relations and vice versa. With this in mind, how might a feminist analysis of the ‘digital metallism’ (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 2013) that continues to underpin new cryptocurrencies proceed? And does such an analysis offer the potential to recuperate a more collective sociality than the model of the atomised individual driven by self-interest offered by libertarian and metallist discourses? This article charts a response to such questions. It follows Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of queer reading, affirming the importance of a ‘speculative, superstitious, and methodologically adventurous state where recognitions, pleasures, and discoveries seep in only from the most stretched and ragged edges of one’s competence’ (Sedgwick 1997, 2).
In this spirit, the article draws on works of popular culture such as The Mandibles and Goldfinger alongside more sober tracts of monetary policy and history to address the gendered, racialised and sexualised discursive practices that have long attended representations of gold and which continue implicitly in the metallic analogies surrounding blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. For if gold is taken to represent intrinsic value because it is derived from nature and therefore believed to be superior to forms of state-backed fiat money based on social convention (‘paper promises’), new digital technologies often make a similar claim. By being placed in opposition to centralised forms of authority and the arbitrary forms of power they represent and uphold, the proponents of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies claim a natural basis for technological forms and therefore the superiority of the pre-social, intrinsic capacities of the technical system itself. Thus, technology becomes the guarantor of non-negotiable value, along with the social and moral hierarchies such essentialism inevitably implies. In this way, the fantasy of fundamental value which gold has always represented returns, together with its related associations of authenticity, certainty and natural law but anchored, in this context, in the technocratic authoritarianism of FinTech. The nineteenth century gold standard, after all, was central to a system of ‘naturalised social inequality’ (O’Malley 2012, 157) that was implicitly supported by ideas of intrinsic value. Contemporary platform capitalism is naturalised in the same manner, along with the neoliberal forms of competition and inequality it reinforces, legitimised by technical systems that are purportedly superior because they are politically neutral and ‘natural’. This is the essence of the crypto-anarchic vision, where ‘each individual would be responsible for seizing the intellectual and technological tools necessary to succeed in the coming society’ (Swartz 2018, 627).
Claims to essentialist, non-negotiable certainty of value as much as naturalised inequality are part of the background for the rise of the ‘new libertarianism’. This article argues that the ascendency of libertarianism in this new technologically-mediated form now means that it overshadows the neoliberalism that has been the focus of sustained critical attention for some decades. As the financial establishment of Wall Street takes aim at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a new historical conjuncture is opening up, one where neoliberal finance capital must now compete with a hegemonic technology sector that is often in alliance with the conservatism of the New Right (Gilbert 2017; Grossberg 2018). This is a conjuncture not only of remarkable technological innovation, underpinned by massive algorithmic computing power that can give rise to new forms of wealth and unpredictable new realities, but also of the resurgence of nativism, survivalism and essentialism.
The midas touch
‘Goldfinger’, sings Shirley Bassey in the title song to the 1964 James Bond film of that name, is ‘the man with the Midas touch’. And indeed, Auric Goldfinger, with his obsessive desire for glitter, does have something in common with the mythical king. Though when combined with his other passions, for modern international hotels, vintage cars, private aircraft, stud farms and world domination, the portly Germanic villain is most definitely marked out as a product of capitalism’s long postwar boom as much as a descendent of the ancient ruler who turned everything he touched into gold. Goldfinger has been in love with the precious metal all his life, he tells Bond, who, tied to a golden table in a Swiss smelting works, is about to be cut in two by an industrial laser. Not for the first time though and certainly not for the last, Bond finds a way out, telling Goldfinger that MI6 knows all about his planned Operation Grand Slam. Goldfinger is momentarily rattled and so with the laser only moments away from slicing into Bond’s genitals, he orders his minions to turn the machine off.
Goldfinger was the third film in what has proven to be a very long series and it established the template that, in one way or another, every Bond film has followed ever since. 007 has been assigned to investigate the activities of Goldfinger, an international precious metals dealer, because the British Treasury suspects he is smuggling gold out of the country so that he can sell it at inflated prices in places such as Pakistan. True to form though, Bond quickly stumbles onto something much bigger. In fact, when he plays the Grand Slam card he doesn’t actually know anything about the plot, it is just a name he has overheard in a conversation between Goldfinger and a Mao-suited Chinese Government official just before the gold-obsessed villain’s security apprehends him. But he soon learns the details: Goldfinger plans to crack open Fort Knox, the site of the US Treasury’s gold reserve, by gassing all of the 40,000 soldiers who guard it. Goldfinger is not out to actually steal any gold, because, as Bond points out, the $15 billion worth of bullion that makes up the pile weighs 10, 500 tons and it would take 60 men 12 days to load the two hundred trucks needed to move it, while the US military would only require about two hours to recapture the stronghold. Well aware of these physical barriers, Goldfinger instead intends to detonate a nuclear device, a cobalt dirty bomb supplied by the Communist Chinese, inside the repository; this will render toxic the locus of the American economy for the next six decades, even as Goldfinger’s own personal gold reserves increase in value tenfold, thanks to the ensuing global shortage. At the last moment though Bond saves the day: he conquers and thereby turns Goldfinger’s personal pilot Pussy Galore who, together with her squadron of young, blonde women flyers, is charged with spraying the nerve agent over Fort Knox from light aircraft. Galore substitutes clean air for the gas in her aircrafts’ tanks, the attack fails, and the bomb is defused 0.07 seconds before detonation.
In Face Value: The Entwined History of Money and Race in America, Michael O’Malley cites a review from Newsweek, which felt that, with the possibly lesbian Pussy Galore ending up in Bond’s arms, the film is really about sexuality and demonstrates that ‘the triumph of good over evil is also the triumph of normality over perversion’ (2012, 194). Similarly, when Bond ‘saves the gold from sterilisation and preserves its potency in the American heartland’ (194), both national security and heterosexuality are also powerfully reaffirmed (Berlant and Warner 1998). O’Malley’s book demonstrates the ways in which debates about money have always centred on the negotiation of difference, especially racial and gender difference, and have therefore been fundamentally implicated in wider debates about ‘normal’ versus ‘perverse’ value. In the nineteenth century debates between ‘goldbugs’ and ‘greenbackers’, for example, ‘specie’ money, based on gold and therefore assumed to have essential value, was consistently tied to ideas of ‘natural’ racial hierarchies and white superiority. Gold, in these terms, not only had intrinsic value, it also represented ‘natural’ racialised identity, while in contrast, legal tender paper money became associated with negotiable and socially determined value and hence with racial equality and also inflation. During the Civil War, for example, Negro soldiers were routinely equated with inflated paper money, with the implication that both lacked ‘natural’ value (2012, 7). In this way, goldbugs consistently used the medium of money to promote white racial supremacy by linking the stability of specie (gold) to the stability of species (the so-called Anglo-Saxon ‘race’). O’Malley argues that fantasies of stable value emerge at times of major cultural transformation and reflect anxieties about racial, ethnic and gender diversity as much as fears about market exchange and false value. With the establishment of the Gold Act of 1900, then, there was a corresponding essentialist consensus not only about value and race but also about gender essentialism and ‘manliness’. And even with the demise of the gold standard such essentialism has proved to be enduring: Goldfinger, as O’Malley notes, ends up resolving the problem of both gender ambiguity and the ambiguity of value, as Bond’s seduction of Pussy Galore ‘essentializes both heterosexuality and gold’ (2012, 195).
Perhaps contemplation of the plot of Goldfinger alone was enough to convince Richard Nixon, who always had a thing for men of action, to take the United States off the Gold Standard, which he did midway through his first term as President. However, calls for a return to the gold standard have been a recurrent feature of American politics since Nixon ended the system of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971. Confirming O’Malley’s thesis, such calls have been invariably associated with periods of significant social, cultural and economic turmoil. For example, in the high inflation/high unemployment conditions (stagflation) of the late 1970s, a period in which new social movements such as feminism were challenging the contours of American society and in particular the social structures established by the New Deal, Ronald Reagan included a proposal to return to the gold standard in his 1980 campaign platform. Placed alongside a plan for the largest tax cut in American history, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA), the proposal was strongly supported by policy makers and business groups, although ‘heavy lobbying from “gold bug” groups did not manage to move the gold standard issue onto the agenda’ (Prasad 2006, 53). More recently, Donald Trump has expressed his enthusiasm for the gold standard (‘We’d have a standard on which to base our money’), and interest in gold as ‘morally-correct money’ (O’Malley 2012, 212) is again on the rise. Trump has also raised the issue of both foreign ownership and the physical location of gold (‘we don’t have the gold. Other places have the gold’), concerns which have been echoed by farright groups in Germany and France calling for the ‘repatriation’ of German and French gold reserves. As Elizabeth Ferry (2016, 69) notes, these debates are conducted in very specific gendered and racialised forms, with images of white men handling gold bars constituting a common trope to signify sovereignty and national identity. Similarly, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, right-wing commentators routinely associated the stimulus spending of the Obama administration with the instability of fiat ‘paper money’ and the inflationary dangers of ‘printing money’, both of which were also tied to Obama’s Afro-American descent.
Bitcoin is inseparable from this history of gold as a sign of stability. The algorithmic process of ‘mining’ Bitcoins is often represented visually via an animated figure of an antiquated miner (a bearded white man) swinging a pickaxe at a lump of rock from which a material form of gold bitcoin bursts forth. This is a short, sharp image that directly ties Bitcoin’s store of contemporary, digitally-generated value into the long history of the mechanical extraction of precious metals from the earth (Bjerg 2016). Similarly, media images of Bitcoin almost invariably show one or multiples of gold-looking coins that have been produced by a range of companies for the collector’s market. Some of these coins are actually tied to units of Bitcoin while others are simply representational novelties, but all are minted from metal: some from brass, some from silver and some from goldplated alloys. Typically though, it is a pile of gold-plated coins (rather than those made of silver), which are placed against a stark black background and used to illustrate news stories about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more generally. This makes for an emotive image, but given that these actual, material coins are only physical representations of the digital information which constitutes real Bitcoins, a photograph of a typical server farm, the place where Bitcoins actually ‘exist’, would be more accurate in terms of representing the object, even if nowhere as exciting as a pile of gold coins.
Roosevelt’s administration had ended the domestic convertibility of the dollar to gold as part of the 1933–1934 changes in order to make possible an expansion of the money supply as an antidote to the Great Depression. But the gold standard was still maintained in relation to foreign governments wanting to buy or sell US gold. At the same time, another aspect of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, the devaluation of the dollar’s gold value from $20.67 an ounce to $35 dollars an ounce, had provoked a flood of foreign gold into the US which, together with the accumulation of the confiscated domestic non-government gold holdings, had dramatically expanded the United States Gold Reserve. As part of the governmental management of the nation’s gold, Roosevelt also established the United States Bullion Depository on army land at Fort Knox in Kentucky. O’Malley argues that this was ‘almost entirely a public relations project’ because America’s gold holdings were already sufficiently accommodated at the Federal Reserve banks and at the San Francisco, Denver and Philadelphia mints (2012, 187). However, the urge to centralise America’s gold was integral to the philosophy of the New Deal, with the Public Works Administration responsible for the much-publicised construction of the actual vault. At the same time, this move was also consistent with, and also a successful camouflage for, the federal government’s increasing centralised control over the money supply and the adoption of neo-Keynesian economic theories. By early 1937, when armoured trains guarded by Treasury officers and soldiers began to ship the bullion to Kentucky from various points in the US, Fort Knox appeared in popular culture as an embodiment of the nation’s financial and masculine vigour. Despite the fact that the Roosevelt administration had taken the United States off the domestic gold standard, O’Malley argues that Americans still wanted ‘to believe in gold for most of the same reasons they always had: the gold standard offered an idea of character, or non-negotiable certainty’ (2012, 195). With the centralised, government-controlled, highly visible pile at Fort Knox, ‘Roosevelt managed to move off the gold standard while simultaneously giving the impression that it still existed’ (195).
The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that systematised the post Second World War global economy institutionalised a gold-backed, globally dominant US dollar against which other governments fixed their currency values. Under such an arrangement any destabilisation of the US gold reserve would have turned the world system upside down, something which Goldfinger’s fictional allies in the People’s Republic of China, which in 1964 was still excluded from the mainstream geo-political order, were keen to see take place. Yet what the plot of Goldfinger illustrates more than anything is the increasing irrelevance, in the globalising world of the 1960s, of having value located not in the actual mechanics of monetary circulation, but in some fixed, material object. Bond’s calculations as to how many weeks it would take x many men to move x many gold bars points to the impossibility of actually dealing with such physically constituted units of value in material terms, especially given that the entire reserve at this time only equated to the now comparatively insignificant sum of 15 billion dollars. Interestingly, 1964, when Eon Productions released Goldfinger into a global cinema market, was also the year in which restrictions on US citizens began to be wound back even as the entire process turned itself inside out and gold ended up being valued in dollars, rather than the other way around.
Unlike the Americans, who wanted to have it both ways with the Gold Standard, John Maynard Keynes had no illusions about the mechanism, which he considered to be a ‘barbarous relic’ (1923, 172) of earlier times, kept alive because of a ‘fetish’ attachment to the metal by politicians and bureaucrats. Like many in 1930s Bloomsbury, Keynes was keen on the new theories of psychoanalysis and he enjoyed mobilising them in order to illuminate the behaviour of conservative public figures: ‘Dr Freud’, he wrote in A Treatise on Money, ‘relates that there are peculiar reasons deep in our subconscious why gold in particular should satisfy strong instincts and serve as a symbol’ (Keynes 1930, 290). Keynes was fascinated by the legend of King Midas, a personification for him of the anally retentive personality, and he often invoked the mythical sovereign when explaining what he considered negative aspects of economic behaviour, such as hoarding. According to the Roman poet Ovid, Midas had ruled over part of Anatolia some time before the Trojan War. Dionysius had offered him a wish and so Midas asked that everything he touched should turn into gold. This worked really well until he sat down to eat and drink, and found that even his food and wine had become gold. As recounted by Ovid, Midas then begged to be released from the burden, renounced wealth, became a devotee of Pan and fled to the countryside, where Apollo replaced his ears with those of a donkey after he criticised the latter’s lyre playing. Alternately, in Aristotle’s version, Midas simply starved to death, unable to digest his metal diet. Keynes saw a similar fate in store for contemporary central bankers:
The day must come, and not too far off, when our modern Midases will be filled to the teeth and choking. And that, perhaps, will be the moment which the irony of heaven will choose for granting to our chemists the final solution of the problem of manufacturing gold, and of reducing its value to that of a base metal. (Keynes 1982, 71–72)
Keynes died in 1946, but had he lived a couple more decades, it is likely he would have found Auric Goldfinger a very simple case for analysis.
Gold bugs and the new libertarianism
The Mandibles and Goldfinger are texts that provide a unique window on to the political unconscious of their time and of the fears and anxieties that animate it; they are also narratives about money and, specifically, gold. The Mandibles is an account of white middle class America under siege, assaulted by financial regulation, government authorities, immigration, and most perniciously of all, progressive taxation. It reprises many of the concerns that appeared in the 2016 American presidential election and focuses on the devastation to middle class lives caused by neoliberal financial capitalism and economic mismanagement. Although the narrative is set in the near future, its prediction of an imminent collapse of the mainstream economy as well as its key message of survival (individuals need to invest in non-state controlled forms of money as part of their preparations for a bleak and unpredictable future in which they are very much on their own) are already widely held, popular views, repeated across the public sphere in a range of sources, from James Rickards’ (2011) bestselling book Currency Wars to financial advisers running suburban wealth creation seminars. In The Mandibles, Shriver’s fictional solution to the economic woes of contemporary America is predictably libertarian: a gold standard, flat taxation, no state welfare, no social safety net, and aggressive isolationism. Rickards most recent book, The New Case for Gold (2016) essentially repeats the same message: gold is the best form of money for the present era of endemic political instability and recurrent crisis.
The ‘M’ that features throughout Shriver’s novel stands for Mandibles, the name of the family forced to endure the hardship of yet another economic collapse and whose improvisations concerning everything from food and grey water to toilet paper and shelter provide an almost text-book case of twenty-first century survivalism. The mandible is also the name of the largest jawbone in the face and one that is essential for eating, suggesting that this family is quite literally being ‘chewed up’, vainly trying to reproduce itself under conditions of attrition that ‘gnaw away’ and eventually devour it (Berlant 2011, 28). It is clear, however, that the ‘M’ of The Mandibles also stands for Money (‘M’ being the symbol for money in economic equations), which in many respects is the novel’s main subject. When the Mandible family fortune is wiped out, all that remains are two gold goblets; the American dollar is worthless but gold retains its value and becomes critical to the family’s survival, useful in a directly tangible way.
A range of contemporary white, middle-class American anxieties surface at various points in the novel (Kilian 2016): with generalised impoverishment the prospect of any kind of social mobility has disappeared for the family, along with millions just like them; any chance of inheriting the wealth carefully amassed over generations has similarly vanished. Meanwhile, the affluent Chinese are one of the few groups now able to afford realestate, College and much else; Latinos are now the socially dominant ethnic group and Spanish is an official language and more widely spoken than English, and America also has its first Mexican-born head of state. One of the recurring themes of The Mandibles is that no one in power can be trusted, especially not a government that defaults on the national debt, manipulates the money supply, and overtaxes its citizens. But what is most disturbing is what has happened to the citizen’s civil liberties, personal property and, more specifically, his or her gold. A Hispanic President confiscating the gold of hardworking middle-class (and, it is implied, white) Americans is one of the novel’s most important themes (Grady 2016). The forfeiting of gold is not only a symbol of the immediate monetary dispossession suffered by the American middle class but also of a string of perceived dispossessions, interrelated on a much wider scale. The Mandibles presents a libertarian caricature of state-managed dystopia, and Shriver has been clear about her alliance to the libertarianism, which, she argues, ‘forms the conceptual backbone of the United States’ (Shriver 2016b).
Paradoxically, what is paramount for order and regulation-shunning libertarians is stability of value, a stability that can only proceed from value being pegged to something that is fixed rather than open to negotiation. To this end, when Keynes was arguing against the Gold Standard in the 1930s, his ideological counterpart at the London School of Economics, Friedrich Hayek, was passionately advocating for the Gold Standard, because he saw it as the only way to guarantee ‘sound money’. Hayek would go on to work at the University of Chicago’s School of Economics and then at the University of Freiburg, the leading site of neo-liberal theory in Europe, whose output Foucault analysed in his 1978–79 lectures (Foucault 2008). Nonetheless, by the early 1970s even Hayek had given up on the Gold Standard, not because he’d lost faith in the ‘sound money’ it supposedly guaranteed but because he thought it was no longer politically achievable. Instead he proposed the even more politically unlikely abolition of governmental controls over national currencies. All currencies should be available, everywhere, Hayek argued, so that only those that were sound, as in those backed by debt free, fiscally responsible economies, would be sought after and therefore survive in what would amount to a survival of the fittest currencies. He went on to advocate abolishing central banks and thereby the monopoly status of national currencies altogether, allowing for the development of non-state-backed private moneys. Hayek (1976) thus supported the complete deterritorialisation of money, including its ‘denationalisation’, as one of the most important steps in removing money from state control more broadly. A distrust of government, unregulated private forms of money, and a strong emphasis on anti-inflationary mechanisms were economic ideas primarily associated with the Austrian School and shared by figures such as Ludwig von Mises and Carl Menger (Dallyn 2017, 468). A purely subjective understanding of value, in which individuals freely choose their own money within the context of robust market competition beyond the control of any state authority, is an important dimension of these ideas: as von Mises argued, ‘it is not the state but the common practice of all those who have dealings in the market, that creates money’ (quoted in Dallyn 2017, 468).
In the anti-statist, anti-government, anti-bank space opened up since the financial crisis, such ideas have gained traction, producing what has been described as a ‘new libertarianism’ that unites far-right politicians such as Ron Paul and the anarchist left of the Occupy movement. Calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve and restoration of the gold standard, Paul’s 2012 ‘End the Fed’ campaign succeeded in creating a ‘monetary populism’ that attracted new supporters disillusioned with the mainstream financial system and doubting the credibility of state money (Burns 2012, 46). Bitcoin has become central to this populism and the economic libertarianism that underpins it. As the Federal Reserve resorted to repeated cycles of quantitative easing, confidence in the capacity of the state to act as anything other than a ‘dealer of last resort’ (Mehrling 2011) reached its nadir. With the loss of trust not just in the Fed but also in government more generally, and in the light of scandals such as LIBOR and Wikileaks, a perception grew that little was certain outside of the cold and impersonal algorithms of a digital ledger. As one ‘crypto-enthusiast’ explained:
My generation doesn’t have trust in financial institutions … We are the generation who have grown-up in a financial crisis where the people responsible were not held accountable. Bitcoin doesn’t have a building or a company, it’s decentralised and trust is built into the technology, and people don’t have that trust in big banks any more. (quoted in Collett 2017b, 3)
Rather than ‘trust’ in the state and its institutions, Bitcoin transfers trust to the cryptographic mechanisms of the underlying blockchain technology, which time-stamps and verifies all transactions and creates an irreversible, failsafe public record. Traditionally associated with the kinds of espionage familiar to the world of James Bond, in the 1980s cryptography was taken up by internet activists concerned with the protection of individual privacy in the face of growing government surveillance. Advocating for the creation of cryptosystems that would enable individuals to transact information, including payments, without the need for an intermediary, coalitions of cypherpunks and cryptoanarchists circled for many years around the idea of a system of electronic money (Dodd 2014; DuPont 2014; Swartz 2018). Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency to emerge from these discussions, but it has since become the most well known. Eliminating the need for the state and its (potentially corrupt or untrustworthy) ‘middlemen’ is a crucial part of the appeal: ‘So should I trust a centralised agency that’s betrayed me over and over and over … Or do I go with a simple stable maths based crypto that doesn’t change issuance levels on a whim?’ (online comment in Macrobusiness 2017).
Although Bitcoin is a virtual currency, analogies to precious metals are drawn at every step of the system’s design: a unit is a ‘coin’ that is ‘mined’, like gold, in the context of scarcity. Production is limited to 21 million bitcoins, a further illustration of the libertarian values regarding monetary policy that have been hardwired into the technical logic of the whole system (Redshaw 2017). Despite the utopian rhetoric that surrounds the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin’s metallism reflects a deeply conservative approach to money, which, like gold or land, has a fixed supply as the basis for its value (Dodd 2015). This explicit association has, as Keynes recognised, a manifestly clear economic and political history: ‘gold has become part of the apparatus of conservatism and is one of the matters which we cannot expect to see handled without prejudice’ (1930, 291). For Keynes, gold was enveloped in a ‘garment of respectability as densely respectable as was ever met with, even in the realms of sex or religion’ (290–291). This garment of respectability is still being worn decades after the global economy has lost all meaningful relationship to gold: the signifier of the gold standard is still trotted out to legitimise the quality of any number of objects or practices, from English language courses to retina-function testing machines in the medical sciences. By appearing to be outside of signification, as not signifying anything other than itself, gold, as Ferry argues, can become the basis for a whole range of analogical claims to intrinsic value, including by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: as one of Ferry’s interviewee’s tells her, ‘Gold is nature’s bitcoin’ (2016, 57).
There is though a fundamental difference between Bitcoin and the gold standard, in that Bitcoin is not being used as a standard of value but as store of value in circulation. Certainly, a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin can be deflationary if its production is limited but as an actual asset the units are fundamentally inflatable in terms of their tradeable value because their very limitedness makes them increasingly sought after, giving them the potential to become increasingly more expensive in whichever currency they are traded/purchased in. In economic terms this specifically favours the small number of individuals who actually own the limited number of units, in other words, this is a mechanism by which the rich who hold the coin can only get richer. While this may be the opposite of an inflationary mechanism whereby a devalued currency can devalue the assets of the wealthy, it is also the opposite of an expanding money supply that may be of some benefit to the asset-poor by putting more money into circulation. It is also a mechanism that, just like the example of gold, encourages ownership concentration limited to a small number of wealthy investors, or, in other words, a practice of hoarding (Dallyn 2017).
Men with guns, or is another economy possible?
The economist Paul Krugman (2013a, 2013b) is deeply sceptical of Bitcoin: ‘fiat currency is, like, backed by men with guns whereas Bitcoin is not, so why should this thing have any value?’ This scepticism is shared by many on Wall Street including by Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and Chief Executive of JP Morgan Chase: ‘I don’t personally understand the value of something that has no actual value’ (quoted in Collett 2017a, 2). For Deleuze and Guattari, the state is best defined as an ‘apparatus of capture’ ([1987] 2013, 424– 473). The state (as Krugman points out) is also the institution that backstops national fiat currency and underpins its value. Money can transport abstract value through time precisely because it is backed by the guarantee of the state. It is the imprimatur of the state that underwrites the faith necessary for the unit of account to maintain stability of value despite the uncertainties of the future. The state therefore secures a particular temporality (or memory) for money that bridges past, present and future, a set of temporal coordinates that provide the conditions of possibility for the trust that is given a shared material and, importantly, collective, form whenever money is exchanged. But the state’s capacity for violence (‘men with guns’) is also central, upholding not only fiat money but also state-sanctioned capitalism more broadly and ensuring its dominance over other systems.
Much of the enthusiasm for blockchain and other distributed ledgers stems directly from the fact that the technology removes the state (and therefore its potential for violent infringements on individual freedom) from the capture of both monetary and non-monetary value exchange. At a time when personal data has become a valuable commodity, a digital asset that can be gleaned from myriad everyday transactions, the use of systems to protect individual privacy from both government interference and big data is only likely to expand. Beyond its immediate use for facilitating monetary transactions, moreover, blockchain-based technologies are now being put to work in a range of non-monetary contexts, including commons-based cooperativism, and in decentralised infrastructures for resources such as water and energy production. Feminist interest in the blockchain’s potential for supporting new kinds of self-defining communities and for alternative cooperative organisation more widely has tracked alongside such uses and is also growing. The cooperative, FairCoop, for example, describes itself on its website as part of a new, self-managed society ‘based on autonomy and the abolition of all forms of domination: the state, capitalism, patriarchy, and all other forms that affect human relationships and with the natural environment’. Based on the cryptocurrency, FairCoin, this cooperative is underpinned by the principles of mutual aid, solidarity and decentralisation and uses peer-to-peer cryptographic technology to create a new economic system organised around ‘open cooperativism’.
The 2017 Fortune article ‘Bitcoin Began With Men But Women May Be Cryptocurrency’s Future’, surveys the gender politics associated with blockchain technology, highlighting the role that women may play in new start-ups: ‘We have an opportunity to rebuild the financial system … Are we going to do it with all guys again?’ Similarly, the founder of Women in Blockchain, Mehrain (2017) focuses on ‘the core promises of blockchain to empower human rights’. Swartz (2017, 2018) has described these applications of blockchain technology beyond money as ‘infrastructural mutualism’. By emphasising the ordinary transactions that blockchain enables and the socio-economic inequalities it can address or change, such applications present a critical alternative to dominant technoutopian fantasies. In the area of international remittances, for example, interest has focused on the potential of cryptocurrencies to lower the costs of transferring money across national borders, much of which is being sent to developing countries and where women constitute half of the senders and two-thirds of the recipients (Maddox et al. 2016; Salmon 2015). Another initiative, Humanique, describes itself as ‘Empowering the Unbanked’ by promoting cryptocurrencies in the Global South. This organisation is based on what it calls ‘Self-deploying financial infrastructure: true hope for the unbanked, blue ocean for business’. These more prosaic applications appear to address systemic financial inequalities within everyday community settings and promote financial inclusion. But as Humanique unwittingly discloses, these initiatives primarily constitute new business opportunities for speculative investment capital; indeed, several of the blockchain-based programmes for sending remittances are in fact being established by for-profit companies and major corporations, and the limits of using blockchain for the solidarity economy are increasingly clear (Scott 2016).
Interest in blockchains now spans banks and financial institutions, insurance companies, governments, large corporations and even the military. For the decentralised computing platform, Ethereum, blockchain technology is ultimately the basis for the creation of a ‘trustless’ and ‘liquid democracy’, a radically new social and economic order without the need for centralised authorities or their systems. One of Ethereum’s favourite examples of a blockchain-based smart contract is a marriage contract that is automated and self-executing, requiring no legal intermediaries such as notaries to validate it because it is verified by time-stamped cryptographic code. The smart contract is a compelling application of distributed ledger technology with the potential to offer new forms of democratic governance. But here again, in the example of the blockchain marriage contract, we find a technology unable to itself from normative social relations rather than a platform for the creation of genuinely alternative modes of sociality.
With distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain now considered to be central to a new ‘smart social contract’ it is worth recalling Pateman’s (1989) work on the ‘sexual contract’. Pateman questioned the supposed universality of the social contract in liberal representative democracy and the ‘rights’ it guaranteed to all citizens, showing instead its tacit patriarchal character and history. The abstract, universalised category of the individual that appears so prominently in liberalism and its libertarian variations was, she suggested, always already gendered male, unable to be fully disentangled from the values of the patriarchal political tradition in which it first appeared. Pateman pointed to the patriarchal character of a number of ostensibly universal categories (the ‘individual’, ‘civil society’, ‘the public’) – a critique that is invaluable for thinking beyond the abstract individual invoked by blockchain-based technologies and the politically neutral and ‘trustless’ democratic order they supposedly constitute. The specific subjectivity that has actually been algorithmically predetermined by such systems reflects, all too often, an autonomous individual motivated solely by self-interest. Blockchain start-ups, as O’Dwyer (2015) notes, frequently proceed from ‘a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social/and or political problems’.
Ultimately, developing payment systems that are beyond state authority does little to deconstruct or transform gendered forms of social power that underpin the body politic and its monetary and financial systems. The hyperindividualist, hypermasculinist rhetoric that can be found in cryptocurrency markets confirms that simply removing the state’s presence from a set of economic processes that have been transposed into a new technical register does not automatically challenge other more long-standing structural inequalities or systems of power. Moreover, the libertarian, anti-statist ideologies that animate much interest in the potential of distributed ledger technologies to produce an alternative economic order are far from anti-capitalist. To the contrary, the blockchain is frequently discussed in utopian terms as the next stage in an evolutionary history of capitalism, one that is, without the encumbrance of the state, now vastly more advanced and efficient (Golumbia 2016; Redshaw 2017; Swartz 2017). At the same time, blockchain-based technologies can also support alternative forms of cooperative organisation shaped not by the abstract, universalised sameness foundational to civil society and the state but by very specific agendas attuned to articulating particular forms of difference traditionally excluded by liberal modernity and not currently recognised or validated by mainstream political and economic systems. Blockchain experiments with ‘programmable money’, or money designed with specific attributes such as purpose, expiry date and community of approved use, likewise challenge centralised state-based structures of money creation and the increasingly anachronistic understanding of money simply as a means of transferring value. Initiatives such as FairCoop and the Economic Space Agency moreover seek to develop what Massumi (2017, 39) describes as ‘collective economies based on notions of the common rather than private property’, strategically using the distributed computing potential of blockchain to create different forms of social and political organisation and cooperation.
Although distributed ledger technology can clearly be taken in very different directions, a number of problems arise simply because of the way in which the technology is commonly conceptualised. In contrast to the familiar maxim that money is a social relation, much of the discussion about blockchain focuses on the way in which the technology turns this idea upside down and inside out, removing social relations, politics, trust, faith etc. and delegating these functions to the network itself. In this sense, as Zimmer (2017, 312) argues, ‘Bitcoin is anti-social in the most materialist sense: it seeks to engineer away the problem of the social in currency’. However, this kind of analysis misses the day-to-day reality of the cryptocurrency and simply, as Dodd (2018, 45) points out, ‘replicates the ideology behind it’. This is an important point. For although Bitcoin may indeed be ‘anti-social’ from one perspective, it cannot avoid being resolutely embedded in and animated by sociality in every dimension of its socio-technical manifestation. Technical systems may well try to erase social relations but they inevitably reproduce the context that governs their development and constitution. And as Dodd shows, contrary to the claims of distributed governance and decentralisation, in its actual operation the system displays a high degree of political hierarchy, social structure and centralisation, ‘massively favouring those with more processing power’ (2018, 46).
The blockchain therefore not only reproduces, but also in many instances intensifies inequities of wealth, power and privilege. Contrary to the dis-intermediation called for by the original Bitcoin white paper, transactions have become re-centralised in a number of ways, particularly through wallets and exchanges. But perhaps the greatest irony is that the overriding interest in Bitcoin is now not so much as money but as a speculative financial asset, in other words, as property (Swartz 2018, 644). And as a financial asset (or store of value), Bitcoin, as Dodd (2018, 44) points out, ‘has the potential not only to rival but to surpass gold’. Middle class families (just like the Mandibles) want to secure their future financial security through the accumulation of both bitcoin and bullion. Since the financial crisis, there has been renewed interest in the gold standard, and in gold as an investment. This has tracked alongside curiosity about cryptocurrencies for similar wealth creation opportunities, with both kinds of ‘assets’ promising to provide certainty, stability and security in a hostile and untrustworthy world. Not coincidentally, both gold and Bitcoin vending machines are now appearing in major cities around the world. In this way, white normativity, middle class property and fantasies of stable, fundamental value interlock yet again.
Conclusion
In ‘Ledgers and Law in the Blockchain’, Quinn du Pont and Bill Maurer suggest that blockchain systems force a reappraisal of two of the basic apparatuses of modernity: the ledger and the contract, devices which ‘have worked in tandem to structure and interpellate human relationships creating “Man” [sic] itself’ (2015, 4). Du Pont and Mauer argue that, essentially, the blockchain continues an ancient function, that of record-keeping and managing uncertainty. And as their short history of other similar, older technologies demonstrates, the social contexts in which these apparatuses arise are never entirely erased from the technology but rather get fully inscribed in it. Although du Pont and Maurer do not specifically mention gender, other than indirectly through their pointed scare quotes, it is worth highlighting here that this social context is also unavoidably gendered, a messy, complicated part of the social system which also gets embedded and reproduced.
The blockchain is without a doubt a novel technology that has the capacity to transform the way we use money and engage in contractual relations. But the implementation of new technologies is never just a technical question that takes place within a vacuum; it is resolutely social and political. Blockchain futurists rarely acknowledge the ‘infrastructural care work’ that goes on behind the scenes, the often invisible, boring and gendered work of developing and maintaining technological systems, testing software and writing code, the ‘everyday mundane work that maintains these infrastructures day after day’ (Swartz 2017, 101). Market mechanisms, similarly, do not appear spontaneously, as if out of thin air, but emerge within and are dependent on resources, materials, money, regulations and dense layers of social, institutional and political negotiation that comprise their hidden histories.
Financial institutions, banks and large corporations have recognised the distributed ledger technology as a profitable way of moving value around the financial system at fast-speeds and with lower costs, and are investing large sums of money to develop applications that suit their interests. Activist groups, meanwhile, are using the technology to develop peer-to-peer sharing economies. In both instances there is a somewhat utopian faith in the ability of technology to override deeply entrenched structural inequalities and obdurate forms of social power. But can they be so easily eliminated and will the future be able to so seamlessly disentangle itself from the past? ‘Digital metallism’ (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 2013) illustrates that even the most radical dreams of futurity are often built on the most conservative of materials, in this instance, gold, that most conservative of metals.
In some ways, Hayek’s vision has actually come to fruition, as there are now hundreds of cryptocurrencies in circulation. The banking industry is investigating the possibility of developing cryptocurrencies as viable forms of state currencies, central bank cryptocurrencies (CBCCs). This paradoxical development foregrounds the fundamental question of whether decentralisation in a technical system necessarily results in the decentralisation of power in ways that are expected (O’Dwyer 2017; Reijers and Coeckelbergh 2018). More to the point, given the new libertarianism of contemporary platform capitalism, a completely decentralised future may not necessarily be the one to want.
The discursive practices that attend representations of gold invariably take very specific gendered and racialised forms. Whenever metallic analogies are drawn for blockchainbased cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and whenever their use is associated with claims to the stability of value long represented by gold, this gendered and racialised history is inevitably reproduced. At a time when uncertainty is the general horizon of social and economic life, blockchain technologies promise a new algorithmically-based form of verifiable certainty, permanently rendered in cryptographic code. By providing new ways to exchange value directly between two or more parties, without the mediation of the state or other intermediaries, these technologies can support alternative forms of (non-patriarchal) social and political organisation. However, not only do libertarian fantasies of non-negotiable stable value return with such visions of technological certainty, it is an illusion to think that the abstract, pseudo-anonymous individual coded by algorithmic technologies can be completely free of gendered forms of social power or politically neutral. Gendered social contexts are inscribed in these technologies and can never be fully erased from their use. With the blockchain intersectional factors such as gender, race and class may be irrelevant for establishing one’s transactional identity, potentially removing the kinds of discrimination that have attended the money forms of the past. But, at the same time, an equally longstanding feature of such money forms, the model of the atomised competitive individual, often remains intransigently at the basis of blockchain systems.