Cops love pulp fiction, too. Yesterday, choosing one of the most high-profile crypto conferences of the year, an agent from the SECURITIES and Enforcement Commission (SEC) reportedly subpoenaed a crypto founder as he prepared to take the stage.
The plot points certainly fit the narrative: the cryptocurrency movement, fighting for financial freedom and equality, is being curbed by the state. The latest chapter in this familiar tale is said to have taken place at the top of the elevator shaft at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.
There was no immediate confirmation of details of the incident. But Ryan Selkis, the founder of Mesari Media, which is hosting the 2021 Mainnet conference, believed it when he announced his candidacy for the United States Senate.
“If you want to know when I decided to run for Senate, it’s these [redacted] people who came to my events without buying tickets and subpoenaed one of the speakers,” Mr Selkis wrote on Twitter yesterday.
How’s that for hard-hearted people?
No one was sure selkis was serious. When asked about his candidacy, Selkis told CoinDesk, “No comment.” All of which lends itself well to the novelization of cryptocurrencies. In announcing his candidacy for president, however, Selkis ushered cryptocurrencies into a new era of political action — condensing a movement into a movement.
It’s a big turn for an industry that reads like a novel, and an opportunity for cryptocurrencies to define their goals. Selkis is an outspoken proponent of cryptocurrencies starting to lobby and elect individuals who benefit the industry. While “holders” or those who want to be “bitcoin candidates” are in power, it’s not clear what it means to be a “bitcoin candidate” beyond vague praise for the industry.
In his 1995 essay “Movements and Campaigns,” the philosopher Richard Rorty outlined how the great political dramas of the 20th century can be better understood as smaller histories of scattered events, with individuals working toward specific goals rather than systemic processes.
Exercise, Rorty writes, is a finite thing, “something that can be considered successful or has so far failed.” By contrast, movements like Marxism or Christianity are “too big and too vague to do anything so simple.”
Encryption is a movement. Bitcoin is at the center of a generational conflict that wants to reshape everything from money to the Internet to what people eat. It has millions of invested players and countless competing ambitions. It’s a brand. It’s a way of life. That’s a story we’re telling.
It’s like What Irving Howe called modernism, “one of the great turning points in the history of Western culture.” Howe is the lens rorty uses to prove his point. As a young man, Rorty writes, Howe was involved in world history’s attempt to establish socialism in the United States. A believer in modern humanism, he founded a magazine called Dissent to tell its story through literature and criticism.
Like many of his contemporaries, Howe was disillusioned by grand political machinations. But he never lost sight of what socialism could achieve: using dissent to fight for workers’ rights, free speech and egalitarianism. Howe was a warrior saint, but he didn’t win all his battles.
Rorty thinks this is a good thing. “Sports can go bad,” he writes. They can, and often are, replaced (modernism loses out to postmodernism’s higher modernism). These grand narratives establish a contrast between good and evil, but never define what success means.
Specific movements can win or lose, but it’s about consciously trying to make the transition.
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