The illusion of decentralization: cryptocurrency and the contradictions of digital capitalism

The alternative is not a nostalgic return to an economy without sophisticated technologies or complex financial institutions. Nor is it the fantasy of abolishing mediation altogether. Modern economic life necessarily depends upon extensive forms of coordination, cooperation, and institutional organization. The question is whether these relations will remain subordinated to private accumulation or become subject to conscious democratic control.

Freedom cannot consist in the impossible achievement of absolute independence from others. It must instead involve the capacity to participate meaningfully in shaping the social conditions upon which one's life depends. Economic emancipation requires not the disappearance of institutions but their transformation from instruments of private domination into forms of collective self-government. This is the possibility that the ideology of decentralization obscures. By identifying freedom with the elimination of intermediaries, it diverts attention from the more fundamental question of how the institutions through which we necessarily relate to one another should be organized.

The scandal is not simply that billions of dollars could be stolen from a supposedly secure financial system. It is that a financial system celebrated for liberating individuals from centralized authority has become dependent upon precisely the concentrations of power it promised to overcome. The problem, ultimately, is not that we depend upon one another. Such dependence is inseparable from human existence and the very possibility of freedom. The problem is that capitalism organizes our interdependence through institutions over which we exercise so little control, while encouraging us to imagine that freedom consists in having no need of them.