Ten years ago today, the first payment of public university fees in Bitcoin was processed – and live on stage at a festival in Paris. Bitcoin is currently around 60,000 dollars each. Back then, on May 7th 2014, it was around 430 dollars each. Would that make it the highest fee ever paid for a degree? Is the Bitcoin worth 400 or 60000? That’s a philosophical argument one could debate forever – or at least in a PhD thesis.
The payment of 1 BTC (as an instalment for the full course fee) was made live during a panel on the future of currency. The PhD student was Leander Bindewald (on the right in the picture above) and he went on to complete his thesis on the discourse of money (see below for a close up of the payment screen).
I was Leander’s supervisor, and had arranged for the University of Cumbria to be the first public University in the world to accept cryptocurrency for payment. One can only wonder what might have been if the University had decided to retain the Bitcoin rather than convert it immediately into pounds. At least I’d have met my income target (finally). At 6 BTC for a graduate certificate (see below), that would be 360,000 dollars at current market rates. Wow… although studying with me might have been priceless 😉 Today I am happy to keep teaching a similar course after leaving academia (quick plug: ‘Leading Through Collapse’ happens online in September and in person in California in October).
At the same Ouishare Festival 2014, I explained the risk of new ‘sharing economy’ platforms and digital currencies becoming huge market players that would abuse their power to surveille and exploit. I argued for developing codes of practice and countervailing forces. A well known champion of the sharing economy, Ariane Conrad, quoted from my speech, where I called for a “public interest charter for private enterprise in the collaborative economy, mandating data portability (each individual owns and has the right to all information collected about him/her), based on open source and interoperable software with a commitment to counter surveillance, and facilities for the suppliers of shared services to organise and jointly represent their views to the firm, perhaps even via cooperative governance systems.”
At other events that year I upset organisers by warning of a new corporate totalitarianism that would emerge because network effects would enable monolithic bigtech corporations to own an entire market. I was ‘off message’ as many people were imagining that tech could magically solve all problems of the world. In the decade since then both monopolistic and speculative practices have dented naive hopes in the power of tech to ‘magic away’ all problems of the world. Yanis Varoufakis has even given a name to this new era – technofeudalism. What I didn’t realise in 2014 was that the monopolistic power of some bigtech corporations would enable them to team up with deep state organisations and corporate partners to destroy democracy by manipulating public awareness of the opinions of both experts and peers on current affairs (e.g. disease, war, and climate). The fact they believe they are the good guys protecting us from ourselves makes them even more dangerous. It is something I explain in Chapters 8 and 13 of Breaking Together.
Perhaps Ouishare became popular, and attracted major corporate sponsorship precisely because it didn’t tackle the issues of ownership and governance head on. Ten years ago, greedy capitalist enterprises seeking to dominate the taxi and accommodation markets were ‘redwashing’ themselves with the story of being socially progressive and greenwashing themselves with the story of enabling the more efficient use of limited resources. Under that cover Uber even deliberately misled regulators by targeting their phones and laptops to hide the amount of ride-sharing that was happening. We can only wonder what other kinds of manipulation of the online experience of regulators and politicians has been happening since then… might that be partly why our top bureaucrats and politicians appear to live in a totally different world to us? A world where genocide, potential nuclear war, excess deaths, banker bonuses, and an environment so toxic we can’t enjoy the sea air, don’t seem to matter to them?
To convey the way monopoly capitalism by digital platforms ends up ‘doing over’ customers, suppliers and staff, author Cory Doctorow recently coined the term “enshittification”. “It’s a three stage process,” he writes. “First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” Witnessing the ongoing dominance of Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Airbnb, and others, he sounds rather hopeful about the ultimate destination of people abandoning monopoly platforms as stinky poo. As sources of hope, Cory points to initiatives trying to address monopolistic abuse: “The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.” The hope, therefore, is some competition might be restored and therefore reduce abuses of monopolistic power. It is no wonder, then, that US BigTech firms are pleased with how US foreign policies have been weakening Europe over the last 21 years – a kind of weakening from unnecessary wars, fuel hikes, and divisions over refugees that is so insidious and unexplained that few citizens have realised either the true culprits or beneficiaries. Shrinking the influence of an EU superpower pushing back against global monopolistic strategies is a far bigger win than a local ban on a competitor like TikTok.
The dangers of monopoly power were already clear 10 years ago. Therefore, many groups were promoting cooperatively-owned sharing platforms and alternative currencies. I was trying to help them grow, by advising projects, publishing papers and presenting the need for them to be better supported. But I discovered that philanthropic foundations and governments were not interested, while venture capitalists were focused on benefiting from speculative bubbles and monopoly profits. You could read Peter Theil’s ideas for an illustration of that kind of infinite greed being cloaked in stories of efficiency through heroic entrepreneurs (like him, of course). That is a reminder that corporate abuse of stakeholders is often aided by the state and philanthropic power, rather than resisted or ameliorated. They act as an alliance for an expansionist and extractive Imperial Modernity, as I described in Breaking Together.
If you watch videos of the 2014 Ouishare conference, you will see a lot of hope expressed about how much we humans can enjoy collaboration. The lesson from the corporate hijack of that public-spiritedness is unless we guard against personal greed and the extreme profit motive of venture capitalists and publicly-traded corporations, then our efforts will become counterproductive. The founder of the Body Shop said the same thing twenty years earlier, when she discovered how floating her company on the stock market meant it couldn’t operate in the same mission-driven way. Anita Roddick later labelled that system ‘financial fascism’. That insight is essential as we enter an era of disruption, where companies will be offering their particular solution – from modular reactors to geoengineering. That is why I am a supporter of MEER, which focuses on open source and community-based ways of coping with the extreme heat that will beset urban centres in the years ahead. It’s bottom-up approach explains why it has struggled to obtain funding and why some elitist experts have been antagonistic toward it.
I have chosen to return to these issues in this blog post because there was huge interest amongst the Deep Adaptation community in Budapest in the topic of alternative currencies, thanks to my colleague Matthew Slater at the recent World Adaptation Forum. Likewise some parts of the alternative currency and sharing economy fields are now recognizing how a breakdown of modern industrial society makes their initiatives even more valuable and urgent – so long as they are community-owned. Writing in shareable, a world leader in community and crypto currency, Stephen DeMeulenaere said “it was moving to see Dr. Bendell reiterate his support for reclaiming our monetary power as part of a freedom-loving environmentalism. This call… comes in a chapter on what he calls the “new doomster” way of life. He provides examples of how people have been transformed either by their experience of societal disruption or by their anticipation of collapse, to live life with more courage, compassion and creativity.”
Therefore, if you are wanting to help soften the crash and the crazy, please look into how to get involved in initiatives to re-localize trade that use systems which aren’t dependent on ‘don’t-be-evil’ global corporations (whether old ones or new crypto ones). A way to keep in touch with developments is to follow Matthew’s blog.
Was it the most expensive degree of all time? Unfortunately not. Because of the neoliberalization of Universities, 60,000 dollars is nowhere near the most expensive degree today. The fact that University bureaucrats (including former academics) have participated in a process of moving Universities away from enabling the emancipation and actualization of the next generation, toward oppressing them through huge debt and a narrow training, is disgraceful. It is no wonder that many top University bureaucrats reacted so callously towards students during Covid and again during outrage at support for genocide. I hope University students all postpone their entrance to the most draconian Universities later this year and cause a financial crunch for them.
If that is your situation, then remember there is always great work to be done around the world during a gap year. In the meantime you could read Leander’s PhD on the nature of money, or study a free online course on that topic which I developed with Matthew Slater. (I was so obsessed with developing the course that I forgot to buy Ethereum on pre-sale… argh!)
Below I share some videos that provide background to a more solidarity-based and freedom-loving approach to both the sharing economy and alternative currency systems.
My appearance on BBC Breakfast in 2014, talking about cryptocurrency, was removed from youtube. If you find it, please add it in the comments.
Check out the vidz!
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