A Thousand Blockchains: Capitalism and Tokenmania

Capitalism has become able to appropriate economically and quantitatively our “qualitative field of life” and to destroy and create social relations based on debt mechanisms. In parallel, technologies such as blockchain are expected to disrupt business practices and social interactions as they are currently conceived. For Brian Massumi, blockchain is what we need to resist capitalism and escape its pervasiveness, as it can help us “reinvent” the concept of value within broader collective arrangements. In this article, the author argues against this assumption; blockchain is still inadequate for effectively resisting the pernicious effects of capitalism, and decentralized technologies cannot replace the hard work of politics.