The MacGuffin, Part 1: The Corrupt Crypto 'Revolution'
May 18, 2022·79 comments
Crypto promised to dismantle financial oligarchy. Instead, it became exactly what it claimed to oppose. The revolutionary billionaires and the incumbent powers they fought have merged into a single structure, indistinguishable from each other. What happens when the narrative of disruption becomes the mechanism of control?
- The MacGuffin replaces the mechanism. Yield farming has no economic purpose. It's a pure object of desire wrapped in technical language. Money flows in because others put money in. When the structure collapses, it collapses completely.
- The structure is everywhere, not just crypto. What crypto founders describe in farming is the same fundamental architecture as venture capital, public markets, and every asset class in between. The MacGuffin is the dominant real-world use case of finance itself.
- The revolutionaries invited the state inside. Billionaires calling for federal oversight aren't asking for constraint. They're asking for the panopticon. The very mechanism they claimed to escape becomes their tool of control.
- Indistinguishability is the point. By the end, you cannot tell which side won. The pigs and the humans look the same. The captured financial system and the new one are one system.
- The game was rigged before the first block was mined. Not through conspiracy, but through structure itself. Our brains are built to pursue MacGuffins. Finance is built to exploit that.
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