David Golumbia, an assistant professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, an aspiring political pundit, and the author of the recently published book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism , denounces Bitcoin in a recent blog post titled Trump, Clinton, and the Electoral Politics of Bitcoin . “[What] concerns me about Bitcoin is how it contributes to the spread of deeply right-wing ideas in economics and political philosophy without those right-wing associations being made at all explicit,” says Golumbia, adding that the freedom and democratization offered by distributed ledger technology, able to resist interference by central authorities, are actually extreme right-wing concepts. It is, of course, sad and disturbing to realize that aspirations to freedom are seen as right-wing extremism by certain sectors of contemporary “culture.” Golumbia’s book is promoted as “new scholarship” by the publisher — if that’s new scholarship, I’ll take old-fashioned authentic scholarship anytime. According to Golumbia, the politics of Bitcoin and the blockchain are intersecting with the current U.S. presidential election. “There is certainly a fair amount of support for Trump among Bitcoin enthusiasts,” says Golumbia. “I do think that there are connections between Bitcoin and Trump.” And where are those alleged connections? Throughout the vibrant, creative internet communities that fuel the development and deployment of distributed ledgers, along with many of the empowering technologies that are emerging, according to Golumbia. “[The] kinds of false, angry, other-targeting ideologies on which the Trump phenomenon depends can be readily found in all the kinds of online communities that create and promote the frightening range of right-wing political action we see everywhere today,” says Golumbia in the blog post. “We should be very worried about Trump, and we should be worried about how Bitcoin and other parts of online discourse feed the hate […]
