Blockchain: The “Crypto-Climate-Technocracy” Doesn’t Work

Haven’t we heard all this before? In the mid-1990s, when the first version of the Internet, Web 1.0, began its triumphant advance. Even then, the technological utopia of a World Wide Web promised to transform our reality into a better world in no time at all.

Let’s take a look at John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” of February 8, 1996 as a euphoric but, from today’s perspective, strangely unworldly testimony to this cyber-utopianism: “Governments of the industrial world (…), I come from cyberspace, the new home of the spirit. As representatives of the future, I ask you from the past to leave us alone. (…) You have no sovereignty over where we gather.”

Dangerous Misinterpretation of the Internet

Barlow’s cyber-utopianism from 1996 pays homage to a dangerous technocratic idealism, at the center of which is the fatal misinterpretation that the Internet, as the incarnation of a great idea (the networking of mankind), can only create good things and is therefore always on the side of the good and virtuous in world history will land.

The decentralized basic architecture of the Internet, as we had to realize ten years later with Facebook and Twitter, by no means protected it from hate, populism, monopolization and the uncompromising capitalization of data use.

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The discussion about blockchains, cryptocurrencies and decentralized financial management that flared up at the end of last year now suggests that the Internet could still turn the corner. Even climate change, oracles by quite serious players, could be stopped thanks to cryptogovernance.

Venerable institutions such as the “World Economic Forum” (in cooperation with the management consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers) and the “Greenhouse Gas Management Institute” have to face the question of whether they are primarily concerned with sensible measures to combat climate change or with the greenwashing of industry and stakeholders Promotion of new technologies for future-oriented investors.

But let’s take a closer look. Washington’s Greenhouse Gas Management Institute is very sweeping about the climate impact of cryptogovernance, predicting that blockchain (will) be an “unexpected force capable of spurring greater levels of participation, ambition, and large-scale investment in climate action.” to mobilize to achieve the Paris goals”.

As early as 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has been a staunch supporter of extensive climate measures for years, spoke out in favor of crypto governance in climate matters. When it came to the topic of “Blockchain for a better planet” at the WEF, however, old neoliberal reflexes were apparently awakened.

It is said that technical solutions such as payments of small amounts (micropayments) on blockchains should enable consumers to control their consumer behavior in such an individualized and sustainable way that the environment benefits from it.

It is understandable that all manufacturing and transport steps of products can be made transparent by means of a blockchain. It is less plausible that micropayments of all things should then help consumers not only to express their concern about the climate, but also to significantly change their consumption and pave the way for mankind to a post-fossil society as conscientious zero-emission consumers.

Blockchains and digital money are obviously not a breakthrough in the fight against climate change. Firstly, counting private emissions is not a sustainable climate strategy, secondly, the question must be allowed as to what advances a new technology can bring here, which itself causes CO2 emissions at an absurdly high level.

The digital currency bitcoin consumes more electricity than 45 million people a year in Argentina, scientists from the University of Cambridge have calculated.

Individualization of environmental debt

The impression that the so-called climate cryptogovernance is a fairly immature technology hype cannot be dismissed out of hand. And if you take a closer look, you will discover a well-known grip on the mothball of neoliberalism: the empowerment of the individual as a large-scale diversionary tactic.

The individualization of guilt digitally, via the blockchain, is intended to provide the technocratic solution to the ever-worsening climate crisis. The individualization of climate debt – via the vehicle of decentralized digitization – suggests a solution in which the polluter industries can simply continue as before.

And what is even more serious: The deus ex machina of the new technology invokes the dubious illusion of a post-political solution to the climate crisis.

This brings us to a popular contemporary myth according to which consumers can first and foremost avert the climate catastrophe through their everyday actions. The individual only has to take responsibility for the planetary destruction and optimize their shopping behavior, then it will also work with the climate.

The narrative of individualizing environmental and climate guilt has a long history. The famous commercial with the crying Indian from 1970 was probably the first attempt to use subtle means to hand over the responsibility for the overexploitation of nature to the consumer.

The spot shows a Native American man navigating his boat down a polluted river surrounded by industrial plants. Pan onto crowds of cars stuck in a never-ending traffic jam; Pan to the crying Indian on the shore, with a tear running down his cheek; Comment: “People start pollution, people can stop it.”

The US beverage industry turned out to be the lobby group behind the NGO “Keep America Beautiful”, which commissioned the commercial. Companies like Coca-Cola tried to defend themselves against state environmental regulations with the spot and therefore declared the consumer to be the sole causer of environmental problems.

In 2004, the mineral oil company BP could already assume that the narrative of individualizing guilt worked like clockwork when it put its legendary CO2 footprint calculator on its website into operation in 2004.

Blockchain is a tool of depoliticization

Now, blockchain and climate cryptogovernance are supposed to individualize climate change down to a consumer problem. Climate change, species extinction and environmental pollution are depoliticized in this way, and the role of politics, the global economic order, companies and markets recedes into the background.

And thanks to the traceability of every production process in blockchains, the great change in awareness towards responsible consumption should finally occur in a miraculous way (which environmentalists and consumer associations have been breaking their teeth for decades).

In this consumer world liberated by technological disruption, the new cyber utopians hope, from now on consumers will only consume CO2-neutral products on a global scale, because micropayments, blockchain and cryptocurrencies make it so obvious and easy.

Behind the steep thesis of cryptogovernance of the climate, ancient beliefs of neoliberalism become visible. First: Without the market, which organizes consumer needs and controls demand through innovations, it is not possible to cope with climate change.

Second: We have to trust the logic of the market with its controllable consumers, because this is the only way – and by means of the magic hand of technocratic revolutions – that the self-empowerment of the individual to take meaningful action against further global warming is possible.

To put it simply: Only the market and its latest technological innovations show the way out – only if we leave the climate problem to the free market forces will the salvation approach.

But we have tried in vain to solve problems with these formulas for too long. Climate Cryptogovernance is an ideology of the purest kind, because it once again fools us into believing that technologies can replace social decision-making, politics and the development of sustainable lifestyles.

There will neither be a democratic future for us based on pure technocratic computer decentralization, nor will climate change be managed in a post-political space of blockchains and cryptocurrencies. All of these are more or less helpless attempts to get a grip on the climate change that is threatening humanity with the old neoliberal tools of deregulation and depoliticization.

Eike Wenzel is an author of the book The New Green Age: How the Green New Deal Will Radically Change the Way We Live. This text is the second part of a three-part series on the interaction of technology and sustainability in the run-up to the federal election.