Cultures of digital finance: the rise of the financial public sphere

ABSTRACT

My contribution intends to map the cultures and practices related to crypto-finance use in two distinct sectors: the ‘mainstream’ space of retail investors and the avantgarde space of artists/activists. This paper explores the realm of crypto-finance by using the lens of cultural and social analysis, deploying a frame derived from the theory of public sphere. By doing this I analyse the cultural production of the publics which coalesced around crypto, evaluating the change of visibility implied in these new public discussions of finance. The aim of this paper is to highlight potential bridges for cultural policy in two fields that have both partially departed from an institutional framework but that ultimately ended up being significantly embedded in mainstream cultural and social processes. In the case of ordinary crypto-investors, I will reflect on how platformed cultural production is responsible for the creation alternative financial literacy. In the case of artists, I will explore how blockchain-based innovation nurtured a new space for the imagination of finance and welfare. I will conclude by discussing these developments and drawing implications crypto-finance has for the discussion on the role of financial investment and digital technologies in our societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sphere
• crypto
• blockchain
• artists
• activism

Introduction

In 2022, it is hard to underestimate the relevance of the crypto phenomenon, epitomised by the rise and fall of bitcoin. Dramatic fluctuations in its price, jointly with the spectacular collapse of minor assets (e.g. Luna, who lost 95% of its value in a single day) and the growing attention of policymakers across the globe are all elements that explain its current social, economic and cultural relevance. With a market capitalisation of one trillion dollars (CoinMarketCap 2022), the cryptocurrency ecosystem has lost two-thirds of its value in less than six months, equivalent to the GDP of countries as Mexico or Indonesia. It is estimated that three-hundred million people owned crypto at the end of 2021 (Shrivastava 2022), including a vast audience of small investors with no or previous experience with financial investment.

Cryptocurrencies have been receiving extensive media coverage, both praising their success or deprecating their excessive risks, alongside a growing body of academic literature that spans from economics, anthropology and social sciences is being established. Extensive debates have speculated whether bitcoin is money or not, or if its value is intrinsic or eminently social (Swartz 2020; Prasad 2021). Even from an academic point of view, crypto-finance has clearly entered the mainstream stage. The story of bitcoin, the mother of all crypto, and blockchain – the main technical innovation that propels – is long and articulated (Hayes 2019). The turning point in the history of crypto is the financial crisis of 2008, a true event that dramatically changed the public perception of finance.

The ensuing Great Recession was the breeding ground in which a new wave of activism emerged, most recognisably in the #Occupy wave (Pickerill et al. 2020). In fact, I believe that a more generalised cycle of protest (Tarrow 1998), to use a concept borrowed from social movements studies, was born after the crisis. A wave that saw activists deploying technological advancements that were in the making for decades, as in the case of blockchain, in a new politically charged way. It is because of 2008’s crisis that its distributed and trustless architecture was used to issue ‘money’¹ for the first time. In a subfield of this activist cycle of protest, artists too mobilised to fight against increasingly unfair conditions and the reduction of welfare and overall funding to the arts sector. This was most notable in European countries as France (Corsani and Lazzarato 2008) and Italy (Cirillo 2014) where artists came up with alternative economic paradigms and organisational structures (Cossu 2022), devoting much attention to the potential of creative financial strategies (RobinHoodCoop 2022) or crypto-based forms of value creation and redistribution (e.g. Common Coin, see Braga and Fumagalli 2014).

Overall, this shows how a major economic event turned the tide for the emergence of a new financial wave that saw the participation of a wide and diversified audience: coders, hackers, radical economists, artists and hundreds of millions of investors who, thanks to platforms, could access new forms of financial investment. This process testifies of a mechanism that I believe it can be fruitful to untangle from a cultural angle. Ultimately, what guides this article is an exploration of the aftermath of a crisis in which distrust in established finance led to an articulated and socially based process of rethinking finance. The first step in this process was to place under scrutiny the established financial sector, what followed is a political will enacted by a multitude of subjects to make finance public and social like it has never been before.

My contribution intends to map the cultures and practices related to crypto-finance use in two distinct sectors: the ‘mainstream’ space of retail (small) investors and the avantgarde space of artists/activists. The aim of this paper is to highlight potential bridges for cultural policy in two fields that have both partially departed from an institutional framework but that ultimately ended up being significantly embedded in mainstream cultural and social processes. In fact, the crypto movement originated precisely with the distrust towards centralised institutions, while the artistic/activist scene has renounced to reform the established art sector and proposes to create their own ‘Autonomous Art Institutions’ (Cossu 2022).

In fairness, as it is often the case, a difficult task in research is to identify what is different compared to previous cycles and why it matters to be discussed and analysed now. In fact, it’s not the first time in which ordinary people turn to financial investment. There is at least one significant precedent in the 90s, when 43% of U.S. citizens owned stocks (Harrington 2008). Artists too, in previous cycles, have directly engaged with society, experimenting with the social and economic structure of society (e.g. ready-mades by Duchamp and also Fluxus, who mimicked the organisation of a corporation, see Dumett 2017). However, what is happening right now points to a peculiar configuration in which the new iteration of these trends intersects with a) the digital media environment, who is a catalyser and a multiplier of the visibility of the new financial wave; b) a new imaginary fuelled by fundamental technological advancements. In fact, looking back, when the people started investing in the financial market in the 90s, they were investing on something that existed for at least a century: stocks. What is also revealing of our times is the different profile risks involved in crypto-finance, something that reflects deep structural problems (inequality, lack of welfare and a safe outlook beyond working age) and an uncanny desire for something that might go very wrong.

What follows in this article is a contribution that sheds light on the fascination with crypto across two distinct social spaces: ordinary investors and artists, in the attempt to display an articulated social analysis of the phenomenon. In the case of ordinary crypto-investors, I will reflect on how platformed cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018) is responsible for the creation alternative financial literacy. In the case of artists, I will explore how blockchain-based innovation nurtures a new space for the imagination of finance and welfare. I will conclude by discussing these developments and drawing implications crypto-finance has for the discussion on the role of financial investment and digital technologies in our societies.

Approach and methods

This paper is based on extensive research that I have conducted on both the ordinary world of crypto-investors and artists/activists. In first case, I have gathered data via digital ethnography (Caliandro and Gandini 2017) for the last 4 years, following the main conversations on Twitter, Telegram and Discord. I have also worked on YouTube gathering networks of channels that provide crypto-related financial literacy, also working with visual methodologies (Rose 2016) and content analysis (Lewis, Zamith, and Hermida 2013) to identify their main narratives. Additionally, I have conducted 20+ interviews with ordinary crypto-investors, crypto-influencers and crypto-founders. In the case of artists' engagement with alternative finance, my empirical work is based on a long ethnography during my PhD, which comprised 18 months of participant observation and 40+ interviews to artists in Italy and abroad. This is complemented by document analysis of a corpus consisting of trade press (Corrigan 2018) (including both ‘underground’ blogs and mainstream financial press, as the Economist and Financial Times), cryptocurrency whitepapers, policy papers released by the EU, the Bank of America in the U.S. and the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK.

For the purpose of this article I have decided to focus on an empirically informed theorisation that is capable to shed light on wider societal mechanisms rather than trying to describe local phenomena (e.g. the conversational dynamics in investors chats) in a micro-perspective. My theorisation is inspired by the main tenets of critical social theory (McCarthy 1985) it its being ‘empirical without being reducible to empirical-analytic science; it is philosophical but in the sense of critique and not of first philosophy; it is historical without being historicist; and it is practical, not in the sense of possessing a technological potential but in the sense of being oriented to enlightenment and emancipation’ (McCarthy 1985, 126). It is within this understanding that I deploy an analytical lens based on critical sociology, using the explanatory power of public sphere theory (Habermas 1962 [1989]) to highlight how one of the defining features of this crypto-infused financial wave, which I locate in its fundamental public and social nature. My contribution can be viewed as a part of a renewed interest on public sphere theory (Seeliger and Sevignani 2022), especially in the linking of democratic concerns with processes of digitalisation and commodification.

The financial public sphere

Finance has traditionally been secluded in enclosed spaces. Going back to the end of the XIX century, a great sociologist, Max Weber, had just published a report in which he analysed the then-nascent stock exchanges. In his analysis (Weber 2000) he points out that uneducated, the amateurs might be tempted to view the profits made by professional traders as ‘effortless’ or ‘magic’. For these reasons, he recommended the state commission that regulations should be put in place to prevent amateurs to have access to stock exchanges.

This point of view is also coupled with a fundamental tenet of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere (Habermas 1962, [1989]; 1998) which is the separation of the life-world and the ‘system’. The life-world (lebenswelt) is the space animated by the possibility to find agreement and human understanding in localised social interaction, the place of family relations, groups and by extension civil society. The system is largely dominated by instrumental reason and their autopoietic structures reproduce without having to deal with moral concerns or democratic consensus. Currently, this boundary seems particularly porous in the massive social appropriation of finance that can be witnessed in Crypto-Finance (CF), since it has become part of the everyday life of a vast public of amateur investors.

Historically, the public sphere as a concept has been cyclically debated, particularly in relation to the advancements of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). First, it was the web 1.0 Internet, later it was the age of social media (Rosa 2022), when scholars pondered whether these new technological and cultural configurations could support or hinder the functioning of a public sphere. Scholars as Dahlberg (2006) have tried to transpose the ideal criteria of the public sphere into operational variables to verify whether the new media environment could harbour a democratic function. This indicates a tension between the empirical and normative sides in the analysis of public sphere, an aspect that needs a clarification before I proceed to explore how the public sphere debate might contribute to understand the realm of crypto-finance. The public sphere as a concept lies in the theoretical space of normative theory (Bernstein 2012). Normative theories are usually inclined not to describe empirical phenomena but, rather, to say how they should be. In this sense, the concept of public sphere at its core is about legitimating power via communicative exchanges that concern issues of general interest and that take place in public. Transposing the concept into a physical metaphor, the public spere should transform solid structures of power into fluid entities that can be respondent to the will of the public: private citizens who come together in a shared space – a café, as it used to be in 1700 or an online platform in our days – who fluidify the structures of power via communicative exchanges.

Extensive criticisms have been made to public sphere theory, most of which revolved around the fundamentally rational assumption that mutual agreement is achievable. A notable criticism in this direction was posed by Mouffe (2005), when she stressed that agonism is irreducibly present in society, and it cannot be reconciled by a transcendental faith in reason. Fraser (1990) also proposed a fundamental critique evoking a feminist point of view. In general terms she was questioning the white, bourgeois assumptions in Habermas’ theorisation. Who gets to speak? Who is more listened to? Who can speak better? Who feels confident that their opinion should or must be heard? All these questions point to a factual imbalance that resulted in a critical appraisal of the idealised conditions of the public sphere as based on exclusionary dynamics (class, gender, ethnicity) that permeate the public sphere and society at large. Therefore, if it is empirically verifiable that not everyone gets their say in public spaces, be public squares in a city or online channels. One other element that discriminates access and power in the public sphere is expertise; it would have probably been naïve to think that a recognized expert in a field would receive the same attention of an amateur, before the rise of social media. However, commentators in the early social media era (Shirky 2008) pointed precisely that what internet allowed was to grant amateurs the possibility to establish themselves as authorities, based on the recognition they’d receive online. This phenomenon indeed had a significant growth and complexification. On the one hand, there are increasing resources to acquire autonomous knowledge on the social web, a phenomenon that led futurists to speak of new forms of ‘collective’ intelligence enabled by online technology (Lévy 2006). Currently, peer-to-peer created encyclopaedias as Wikipedia and collections of YouTube videos are created with the explicit aim to provide knowledge and expertise on virtually anything: growing vegetables, building boats, chopping onions or, as in our case, analysing financial charts. On the other hand, there are new ways to accrue visibility and reputational capital, it’s the case of the influencer phenomenon (Marwick 2013), where individuals become micro-enterprises specialising in producing content and advice, including financial advice amidst many other things.

Habermas himself, when writing his seminal book (Habermas 1962 [1989), stated how the ideal form of the public sphere which emerged in the salons and cafes of XVIII century got corrupted by media, including broadcast media and the concentration of power that would happen there (be media publicly or privately owned). The way he defined the XX century form of the public sphere appears harsh and elitist as Habermas writes of a ‘plebeian’ public sphere, implying an alienated public incapable to reason to the adequate standards of his theorisation. Additionally, in order to describe and criticise the levels of power concentration in the hands of few media conglomerates he evokes the power dynamics of the middle-ages when he speaks of re-feudalisation of the public sphere. What is interesting here, is that this term has recently gained traction in the area of post-marxist political economy, and it has to do specifically with the social and economic issues caused by the growing influence of platforms (Morozov 2022). The current developments provide us with a bleak picture: the internet has turned from being a promise of freedom and democracy to the embodiment of worrying levels in citizens’ surveillance (Couldry and Mejias 2019). Incidentally, the analysis of a ‘re-feudalisation’, initially proposed by Habermas in 1962, is currently being used to describe the current technological colonisation with authors from both the left and the right side of the political spectrum concurring in saying that the concentration of power and the expropriation of value from the mass of users ultimately amounts to a new form of despotism: techno-feudalism.²

Platforms are the key ‘spaces’ where the three key processes of crypto-finance take place: learning, communication and investing. What is at odds in this scenario is that the appeal of the backbone technological innovation that sustain the imaginary of crypto was made of elements with radically different values. Premised on decentralisation, peer-to-peer, anonymity, and immutability, the crypto-finance sphere is currently made available to users mostly mediated by centralised platforms that enable users to learn, invest and communicate. In this scenario, platforms sustain a large part of the cultural production, transforming it into a collection of commodities that are circulated via a multi-sided market in which users’ preferences are collected via big data (Nieborg and Poell 2018). In this process, it looks like the intermediate structures have been crushed by the disproportionate power of platforms, which are capable to establish a direct channel between themselves and anomic crowds. In fact, to describe our ‘techno-feudal’ times Neckel argues that our society sees the emergence of ‘a modern capitalism without bourgeois structures’ (Neckel 2019). This might be in line with what can be witnessed in the crypto-sphere especially in relation to their multitudinary actions.

Some scholars have brilliantly argued (Pfister and Yang 2018) how techno-liberalism has significantly complicated the prospects of democratic deliberation in the ‘networked’ public sphere. However, I believe that is fruitful to articulate a reflection on crypto and the public sphere because it allows precisely to evaluate how a technical rationality – automatic systems, decentralised, trust-less – can be viewed as an improvement to our decision-making. One suspicion in this respect is that the politics coded in these artifacts are currently more appealing than the ones expressed by governments or central bank. Finally, if there’s an overlap between public sphere and crypto is that it represents a new domain that societies discuss publicly, an addition that is in line with similar processes of heightened public visibility, as in the case of sex and dating who have been increasingly mainstreamed and commodified (Bandinelli and Cossu Forthcoming).

Precarity, debt and hope: the rise of financial populism

The birth of crypto-finance (CF) coincides with the release of the first Bitcoin white paper in 2008 (Nakamoto 2008), six weeks after Lehman Brothers’ declaration of bankruptcy triggered the 2008 financial crisis. The cultural underpinnings of Bitcoin include antagonism toward central institutions, a sentiment that gained power in early Internet cultures, where it was epitomised by Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (Barlow 1996). Initially designed as a medium of exchange, bitcoin became, from 2015 on, mostly a store of value, similar to gold. The development of bitcoin and its underlying technology has subsequently inspired a new wave of finance with an origin story of money made by the people and for the people (Faria 2021). However, the focus of this new wave has been on digital technologies; this focus is implied by the design of a currency that replaces human trust with public consensus recorded on immutable digital ledgers that can be accessed by everyone (De Filippi and Wright 2019). More recently, cryptocurrencies have attracted new publics that lie beyond the inner circles of technology developers and include amateur investors, along with communities such as artists and activists. From the amateur and individual investor’s perspective, cryptocurrencies are often viewed as means to gain ‘financial freedom,’ to escape from precariousness, inequality, and indebtedness (Graeber 2014; Lazzarato and Jordan 2012). Investment in cryptocurrency constitutes a bet against the traditional financial system (Hayes 2019), upon which the valuation of this sector relies. In other realms, for instance, in the world of political activism, decentralised technologies have been valued for their emancipatory potential to expand peer-to-peer models of production (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006) and processes of commoning (Rozas et al. 2021). In the art world, CF innovations such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have also been regarded as ways to ensure fairer value distribution and sustainability for the art sector, which guarantees artists fair remuneration and full traceability of the uses of their artworks, along with being viewed as a further financialisation of the field (Haiven 2018).

The recent dramatic rise in the adoption of crypto might be explained, first, by the heightened sense of financial insecurity that many people face as a result of the current health, economic, and climate crises. As exemplified by the case of South Korea (Lee 2020), investors have looked to lucrative and volatile assets to compensate for a diminution in the power granted by traditional career paths. Getting a postsecondary degree and working hard are no longer enough to secure home ownership or a decent income. Incidentally, this theme is central to the plot of ‘Squid Game,’ the most-watched show ever streamed by Netflix, a dark tale about Korean society where those who have fallen into disgrace because of debt gamble their lives (literally) to repay their debt and get rich quickly. The increasing prevalence of precarity and insecurity is also familiar in western societies, as evidenced by the abundance of social science literature (Gill and Pratt 2013; McRobbie 2016; Banks 2017) and social critique (Berardi 2009) documenting this existential threat and the resulting growth in class inequality that has occurred throughout the last two decades, both before and after the 2007 global financial crisis (Savage 2015; Friedman and Laurison 2019). From the perspective of growing insecurity and inequality, one explanation for the mainstreaming of crypto looks at the trend toward neoliberal governmentality, in which systemic problems are addressed on an individual basis. Is investment in crypto, then, an individualised response to the systemic issue of precariousness?

Secondly, and consequently, cryptocurrencies, thanks to the unique circumstances of their creation, have given rise to a new class of subjects. Bitcoin, the ‘mother’ of all cryptos, was capable of transcending its material essence – that of a revolutionary, but still slow, inefficient, and polluting system for the transfer of intangible assets – to become a mythology (Dodd 2017) or empty signifier (Mouffe 2009). Bitcoin is most properly understood as a symbol, meaning very little in itself, that has the power to transform a multitude into a community. Bitcoin as a signifier has proved capable of accommodating the hopes, desires, and fears of a generation that has grown up with a permanent crisis as its only social scenery. That generation is suspicious of the institutions – primarily governments and central banks – that are deemed responsible for this crisis.

Crypto for the people

It is not the first time in history where ‘masses’ start to invest. According to the research of Harrington (2008), there has been a moment in the mid-90s, where 43% of U.S. citizens were investing on stocks, what was then dubbed as ‘society of ownership’ where investors held significant parts of the main stocks of those days. Clearly, the numbers of investors grew during the growth cycle that was due to end when the dot.com bubble burst in the early 2000s. Harrington research investigated how many of these investors coalesced around clubs, where decision-making on where to invest the collective resources was made during the monthly meetings by finding consensus among its members. These face-to-face meetings remind the salons in which rational bourgeois used to discuss issues of general interest, and it looks like internet technologies radically remediated these social activities.

Trading, even in the 90s was fuelled by the availability of information that could be found on the Internet (Casnici 2019), actively establishing a separate space from traditional banking. The social foundations of investing are now translated through the affordances the digital world. Several crypto-influencers I have interviewed declared they collaborate in small groups on platforms as zoom where put together market signals, trends and analysis in order to establish a strategy. As one interviewee had to say:

Most people turned to trading and myself included, I started to incorporate trading into part of my activities to understand like yes, ‘I have a more nuanced understanding and belief in the underlying technology, and I see the value, I love holding these things, but how can I also save myself from the oftentimes agony of you know seeing yourself suffer a financial loss’. So, I started to incorporate trading into part of my kind of daily activities and then more recently is I’m really focused on collaboration with others. You know people in the crypto ecosystem I think that’s been one of the most valuable developments of the past year is prior to that. As you know, putting content out there and doing my own pieces and investments, but I was putting it out there and getting feedback from people that read it, but I was never really collaborating or sharing my experiences with people that, fairly recently, between spending more time on Twitter getting involved in discord and a bit more developed, more of a network of people, and as I said, I’m not necessarily publicly sharing a lot of research anymore, but I’m constantly having conversations with people that I trust and that I can have constructive conversations with about where we think you know crypto is heading, what’s happening worldwide, especially with all the changes over the last year and a half from COVID and the financial system and understanding how crypto plays into that. So, I’d say now my main focus is on kind of collaboration and just getting to know people in this space more.

Practices change for amateur investors, as they seem mostly not interested in ‘technical analysis’ or fundamental analysis. Most of them take signals from crypto-influencers themselves, which are known to have vested interests in promoting certain assets over others, often without declaring their conflicts of interest. Another malpractice, also evidenced in interviews, is that influencers share their daily predictions and very often they delete the ones that failed. As another interviewee stated:

Generally, there’s a lot of accounts that I know have got really big, especially trading accounts where they’ll host multiple tweets about outcomes and then when one of them comes true, they’ll delete the other ones and start retweeting that one and saying like how they called this scenario. And then you know it’s an easy way to get followers. You can be like ‘look at this. if you listen to me, you would have made like 10 times your money or I’m right all the time like follow me’. Again, I think that’s not genuine by any means, but I think if you can provide the perception that you’re going to tell people the things to do, that’s going to make them money and that you’re never wrong. You’re going to get people that follow you, especially for that audience in crypto, who is just looking to gamble like they have a little bit of income on the side that they have this vision. They’re going to throw it into crypto and be rich and retire.

This contributes to the creation of a manipulative practice ultimately aimed at the survival of their reputation. The foundational cohort of crypto-investors, originally a generation of enthusiastic technophiles, is widening demographically. People from diverse backgrounds are now investing in crypto – not only the ‘usual suspects,’ young males in their 20s or 30s with postsecondary degrees and specialised knowledge in computer science, living in urban centres and with high levels of income. A recent survey conducted on a sample of 2,000 individuals in the UK (Gemini 2021) showed that 13.5% of them currently invest in crypto or have done so in the past. The composition of this group has become more diverse across all variables, from gender to income and education. The typical investor here is aged between 18 and 44, is almost as likely to be female as male (41% are female, 56% male), is in a relationship, less likely to own their own home, and more likely to have children or dependents at home. To compound the change, investing activity now starts with a yearly household income as low as £20,000, which is below the UK’s national average. This data tells us that those who are investing are not simply diversifying their portfolios. To conclude this demographic snapshot, the same reports reveal that these investors do not typically fit the narrative we find on social media, which portrays crypto investors as aggressive and speculative intraday traders. Instead, these investors tend to have a rather cautious orientation, investing and holding a position for weeks or months. A revealing insight is that crypto, for those at low-income levels, might be the prime or sole form of financial investment, something that also worries regulators considering the high risks involved in this kind of trading.

The digital creation and diffusion of information about crypto, the common awareness of the potential of this economic wave, and the shared mythology about the value of cryptocurrency might configure it as a cultural common (Kay and Wood 2020) or a knowledge common (Hess and Ostrom 2007). Fundamentally based on an extensive material layer that includes a plethora of devices – ranging from large server farms to the smartphones used by retail investors for trading – as well as countless hours of work, the cultural common of crypto-finance can be defined as a new body of knowledge about finance. This cultural common is being relentlessly enriched by a vast array of users, from crypto-influencers to the masses of unknown individuals who write hundreds of comments on forums. The cultural common of crypto-finance can be viewed as a shared pool of resources that current and prospective investors can use for orienting their actions. The information included in this common varies significantly in its degree of authenticity, as the presence of fraudulent content, scams, and Ponzi-esque schemes can attest. Additionally, the cultural common of crypto-finance presents differential access to information, ranging from universally accessible forums and YouTube videos to paid content.

We can think of this cultural common as a ‘Wikipedia of Finance,’ a broad assemblage of digital media products forming the cultural foundation for a new financial literacy and providing a socialisation process for a new financial ethos. This content is largely created in peer-to-peer mode, without reliance on traditional expertise, and includes such formats as videos, written posts, and podcasts. Historically based on memetic and participatory internet cultures (Jenkins 2006), a part of the cultural common of crypto-finance is visible in the fabric of everyday life, as my ongoing ethnographic research suggests – for instance, in informal conversations that take place undetected by digital data-gathering processes. Furthermore, it is possible that beneath the production of this cultural common, an even more fundamental change is taking place: a digitally enabled transition to a post-literary canon (Maxwell, Speed and Pschetz 2017). This transition would imply that the deluge of digital traces in the crypto scene can be accounted for only by framing them as part of natively oral, not written, culture (Venturini 2022). Thus, the mythology of crypto would become a collection of oral tales about the virtues of digital currencies. This development might seem pre-modern, but perhaps it reveals the enduring nature of human behaviour; following Latour (1993), we might say that, after all, we have never been modern. This insight rhymes with a brilliant statement credited to Edward Wilson (2017), the father of socio-biology: ‘[humans] have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’ Regardless of our personal views on the crypto-phenomenon – as regressive, alienating, or emancipating – I believe that crypto-finance holds great importance precisely because of its social relevance.

Crypto for the avantgarde

The social relevance of CF is further attested by its diffusion in the arts sector, a realm that has historically been viewed as separate from the normal social life. In particular, it is worth exploring the adoption of decentralised technologies by the artists to articulate a social understanding within realms that display a higher critical awareness along with a capacity to re-imagine and re-deploy these technologies withing a politically charged ethos. Kant and Schiller are credited for theorising an autonomous space for artistic activity clearly separated from the drudgery of labour and the indulgence of aristocracy. In this sense, art must be free from the constraints that normally apply. An exercise in virtuosity that allows an artist to be self-valorising, not taking account measures of value and worth from without. Later on, after revolutions, the abolishment of empires, the creation of republics, and reform of absolute powers we reach the twentieth century where the picture starts to complexify considerably. The reflections of Walter Benjamin (1935 [1969]) about aesthetics and politics during Nazi Fascism remind us at once of art’s power and how it can be a problematic form for the legitimisation of power. The Futurist movement in Italy is known for having walked hand-in-hand with Fascists in the early days (and more!). Mass and rapid industrialisation has also called for groups to look back at the traditional ways of creating things, if we consider the Arts & Craft Movement. A certain kind of engagé art – although Guy Debord would certainly disagree – has been part of the 1968 struggles.

What is most pressing here is the question of art’s autonomy, especially if we consider how, in recent times, artists have become ethnographers (the observation of human culture). Going back to the concerns that Benjamin voiced in 1934, it’s been debated if the object of artistic transformation should be the site of political transformation – an otherness to which the artist has access to a citizen of our society and as artist. The risk here is the one of the ideological patronage of causes that are beyond the direct remit of artists’ own concerns. If this was the case and artists empowered or instrumentalised struggles that belonged to other social groups (the proletariat, the labourers, ethnic minorities, etc.) what we witness today is their claim, from the left, that artists and creatives have been a part of society since their inception and that they are subjected to similar structural forces as other groups. In this sense, many groups – from Intermittents in France, French art workers, to the wave of art activism sparked in the last decade – have sought to destroy the myth of the pacified artist of Kantian memory: normally trained in liberal arts schools, contributors who, with the grace of their talent, symbolise a reality outside the realm of politics. In this respect, the most important reference to explain the engagement of artists in contemporary times is the understanding of art activism provided by Boris Groys, where he theorises their political position in the social space with a great precision, in his own words:

Current discussions about art are very much centred on the question of art activism – that is, on the ability of art to function as an arena and medium for political protest and social activism. The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon – quite different from the phenomenon of critical art that became familiar to us during recent decades. Art activists do not want to merely criticise the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art – not so much inside the art system but outside it, in reality itself. […] Art activists do want to be useful, to change the world, to make the world a better place – but at the same time, they do not want to cease being artists. (Groys 2014, 1)

In this atmosphere, the main case study for this section, Macao, was created during the winter of 2011–2012 as part of ‘Lavoratori dell’Arte’ (LdA, Art Workers), a group of artists, art critics, curators, journalists and activists who had been politically active in Milan since the previous autumn. Macao defines itself as the ‘New Centre for Arts, Culture and Research of Milan’. Macao became an open space for citizens to experiment with new modalities of art, culture and research only in May 2012, when hundreds of cultural workers occupied an empty skyscraper (Torre Galfa) in the centre of Milan. They were evicted some days after the occupation; a few weeks later, they managed to occupy a former slaughterhouse and moved in there. Macao is part of the Italian Network of Occupied Theatres, active since 2011, and a player in the international artistic activism scene.

Macao can be viewed as many things: a hub, a brand, a space, a process, a group of activists, a venue for concerts, a number of rooms bookable for free for seminars or exhibitions, an alternative innovation centre, a partner for EU-funded projects or an illegal squat. Since its inception, its rank and file has been both highly engaged and diversified at the same time. According to the self-inquiry conducted by Macao on its base in winter 2012, participants in the mobilization were ‘working’ a staggering 35 hours a week, on top of their day jobs. To provide a snapshot of the activity, the average Macao activist is in his or her mid-30s, highly skilled, usually with a degree and with more than one job and is dissatisfied with both his or her income and job type. Artists position in society points to a condition that is far from being contextual or episodic. The uncertainty faced by artists is structural for the sector globally, and the creative city (Florida 2002) is not a solution to this problem, it rather exacerbates the contradictions of this unbalance. This fact constitutes the main underpinning that explains the explosion of activism in this sector.

In their journey 10-years old journey, Macao has dissolved their artistic practice in social processes, which in turn coalesced around issues linked with alternative economic thinking to support their activities and effectively decouple them from the established artistic system or state funding. What this signal is that, once again, alternative financial views become central parts of culture. Ultimately, the fascination with new technologies became part of the process of political subjectivation, where the face value of the early crypto was criticised for being anarcho-capitalist and therefore at odds with their views connected to commoning and sharing. Macao has hosted residencies of former Bitcoin developers back in 2012–2013, including founders of Bitcoin magazine, including Vitalik Buterin, who in 2015 founded Ethereum as a way to vastly improve the network capabilities of Bitcoin. During these meetings, the constituency of Macao could ponder how their political agenda could be enabled by DLTs, and the synthesis was found in Common Coin.

Common coin is a social local currency whereby the more you participate the more you are part of the produced common value. It is connected with the ‘Bank of the Commons’ (https://bankofthecommons.coop), that is a cooperative banking service whose goal is to ‘move towards a new societal structure by adopting FairCoin, using innovative and green blockchain technology, which can serve as a global social currency upon which to develop and implement decentralized financial structures for the Commons’. It aims to support alternative economy projects and social movements on both a global and a local level based on politically encoded blockchain projects rather than profit from mimicking and parasitise existing financial mechanisms (e.g. https://www.robinhoodcoop.org/). The creation and use of a currency are connected to a political shared goal (minimal wage, see Braga and Fumagalli 2014) with the excitement of appropriating and re-signifying a capitalist tool. On a symbolic level, this testifies that this is a new generation of activism that attempts to create its own alternative as ‘autonomous’ institutions (Cossu 2022).

Concluding remarks: the rise of a financial public sphere?

In this section, I will try to weave together the insights originating from the two case studies. Fair guiding questions in this respect would: what these two case studies reveal? And why should we pay attention to the diffusion of crypto and DLTs across the social fabric? And finally, why should it matter for concerns in debates around cultural policy? In the first place, both case studies reveal a desire to decouple from the establishment, be that of traditional finance or the institutional art system. Both viewed as uncapable to provide guarantees, support and minimal welfare. Innovations born under the sign of emancipation are providing us with a mixed reality. Crypto-finance was born as emancipatory and empowering wave but it has been largely co-opted by centralised platforms that serve as informational channels and transactional backbone, amassing big data and building enormous fortunes often with ephemeral and short-lived project, when they don’t reveal themselves as being fraudulent ventures. On the other hand, the cycle of artistic innovation with blockchain has also led to a perverse mechanism where art gets now encoded in NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens), which provide guarantees as to the unique and right enjoyment of exclusive rights for the artist while, at the same time exacerbating the financialization of art, a well-known problem in the sector (Haiven 2018).

One dividing line between the amateur investors and the ‘avantgarde’ approach of artists is the embeddedness in collective subjectivity. If artists through their mobilisations subjectivised themselves through collective action, and the adoption of blockchain technology takes place within an already established frame of action. On the other hand, the amateurs can certainly rely on looser forms of collective identification (e.g. the 99% vs. the 1%, or the ‘small fishes’ vs. ‘the whales’ of finance) but their risk seems more relying on individualised strategies. In this sense, it is telling that the main keyword of the ‘Economic Space Agency’ a think-tank of coders, radical economists and hackers is precisely ‘risking together’, clearly distancing themselves from the mainstream space of individual investors trying, ultimately, to become rich fast.

One would be tempted to evaluate politically this phenomenon. One option would be to view the becoming mainstream of crypto-finance as a pure moment of mania, as the Tulip mania of 1636–7. This might be partially true, and in fact the rise in the interest in crypto seems correlated with bitcoin price (Goddard 2022). However, there are indications that the market is becoming increasingly mature and, to put it in a formula that some investors share ‘I got in crypto for the money, and I am remaining for the tech’ (Deutscher 2022). Not only influencers believe this, but also the Bank of America (Bank of America 2021) who, in their report in late 2021, they confirmed their solid interest in the technology and affirmed a rather bullish attitude towards crypto. This is also reflected in the crucial moment in which we are now in respect to crypto regulation. For systemic and, I might add, imperialistic views, the U.S. is definitely keen in seeing the crypto industry flourishing within its own borders.

On the other hand, major losses in the mainstream crypto scene, as the recent collapse of Coinbase or the crash of Luna has sparked a new attitude recently and especially in the EU, where a new wave in the regulation of crypto has been issued (EU Parliament 2022). This is because the risk, regulators say, is simply too high and there simply too many people investing. In an historically risk-averse country as Italy, where famously people keep their savings idle, there’s a prospective 10–12% of the population who might potentially invest in crypto in the future.

But we should not dismiss why so many people, especially lay people with no previous knowledge of finance are drawn into crypto and its incredibly high levels of risk. One hypothesis that I drew from my research is that possibly, a fundamental shift has happened in the spirit of the time. Something unaccountable for in empirical sociological terms, but something connected to a utopian, magic fix to very concrete problems. In this scenario, I concur with sociologists who see the rise of a new era of enchantment, one that has capitalism itself as its mystical object (McCarraher 2019). The intense cultural activity that takes place in and around the crypto-sphere testifies a new ethos in the appropriation of finance. Something that we have seen in the creation of what I view as ‘cultural commons’ of finance, which amount to the institution of a financial public sphere in which not only the technical details are discussed, but where the meaning of the crypto-finance is consolidated and translated into a new realm of our contemporary lives. In the case of artists, they also advocate for publicness in their initiatives aimed at re-establishing a new sense of financial fairness. These two worlds, artists and amateur investors, they both attest the rise of communicative practices entangled with political aims which is the core object of the public sphere.

The rise of a financial public sphere is also connected to structural economic changes. The number of people who are indebted grows every year. The prospect of having a good postsecondary degree to achieve a career capable of ensuring dignity and safety is out of reach for most. Another hypothesis would be to view the reaction in both fields to existential, financial and social crisis as ultimately desperate and pointless, if not counter-productive. Dissatisfied with the existing arrangements they turned to seductive venues to seek either the riches or implement utopian, autonomous organisations.

In this context, it is difficult to provide an empirically based judgement on which hypothesis is more credible. What the great sociologist Charles Wright Mills once pointed out, sociology is about creating narratives that resonate with the reality we experience. I hope that this contribution, although not being conclusive, can provide a good grounding for the becoming public of finance and what is has meant in our postmodern societies so deeply mediated by digital platforms.

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Alberto Cossu

Alberto Cossu is a sociologist and media scholar whose research is concerned with art and creative work; collaborative and digital economies; with a focus on the organisational processes and new forms of value creation that he studies combining qualitative and digital methods. He currently works as Assistant Professor in Media and Communication within the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester where he is Programme Director for the MA in Digital Media and Society. He has published on several peer-reviewed journals and his first monograph, Autonomous Art Institutions – Artists Disrupting the Creative City, appeared in June 2022 for Rowman & Littlefield International.

Notes

1. It’s still debated if Bitcoin is money. Dodd – Swartz.

2. For an overview on the techno-feudalist debate please see Morozov (2022).