Can Crypto Go From Movement to Campaign?

Cops also like pulp fiction. Yesterday, choosing one of the highest-quality cryptocurrencies of the year, an agent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reportedly appointed a cryptocurrency founder as he prepared himself on stage.

The plot point would certainly match the story: Crypto, a movement fighting for freedom and equal access in finance, was limited by the state. The newest chapter of this well-known story is supposed to have been played on top of an elevator shaft at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.

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No. reporter still must control the details of the event. But Ryan Selkis, founder of the media company Messari, which organized the Mainnet 2021 conference, believed it when he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

“If you’re wondering when I actually decided to run for Senate, it was when these [redacted] came to my event, didn’t buy a ticket and served one of the speakers an assignment, ”Selkis tweeted yesterday.

How is that for hard cooking?

No one is sure if Selkis is serious. Asked about his run, Selkis told CoinDesk, “no comment.” Everything is very suitable for the Romanization of a crypt. However, announcing his offer for office, Selkis brings crypto to a new era of political activity – distilling movement into a campaign.

This is a significant turnaround for an industry that reads like fiction, and an opportunity for crypto to clarify its purposes. Selkis is a loud advocate for crypto to start lobbying and choosing individuals favorable to the industry. Although there are “hodlers” in an office, or those who would like to be, it’s still not clear what it means to be a “bitcoin candidate” beyond saying vague approval issues about the industry.

Read more: ‘Cautiously Optimistic’: Crypto Brings Lobby Muscle to Infrastructure Debate

In his 1995 essay “Movements and Campaigns,” philosopher Richard Rorty outlined how the great political dramas of the 20th century could be better understood as a smaller history of discrete events, individuals working toward specific goals, rather than systematic processes.

Campaigns, Rorty writes, are finite things, “something that can be recognized as having succeeded or failed so far.” Conversely, movements – such as Marxism or Christianity – are “too big and too amorphous to do something so simple.”

Crypt is a movement. Bitcoin is at the center of a generational conflict seeking to re-architect everything from money to the internet to popular diets. It has millions of invested players and an endless amount of contradictory ambitions. It’s a brand. It is a way of life. It’s a story we tell.

It is similar to what Irving Howe said about modernism, calling it “one of the major twists and turns in the cultural history of the West.” Howe was the target Rorty used to set. In his younger years, Rorty wrote, Howe was involved in the world historical attempt to establish socialism in the United States. He believed in the modern human spirit and founded a magazine, Disagreement, to tell its story through literature and criticism.

Like other like-minded people, Howe was disappointed with big political intrigues. But he never lost sight of the attainable goals of socialism: to use Disagreement to campaign for workers’ rights, for free speech and equality. Howe was a “military saint,” but he did not win all his battles.

That’s better, Rorty thinks. “Movements can be scratched,” he wrote. They can, and often are, replaced (modernism lost to high modernism, which lost to postmodernism.) These grandiose stories set good against evil, but never clear what it means to succeed.

Specific campaigns can be won or lost, but they are conscious attempts at transformation.

One of the main conflicts in crypto now is the lack of regulatory clarity. Rarely do people be clear about what they want from the government. People are content to build in the shadows and sometimes hide the attention of a conference stage. Until the time when a process server appears.

Read more: Crypt Politics | Opinion

Selkis ’run for Senate could offer crypto a new platform to support and directly direct the effective policy goals it pursues. The SEC targets concrete goals: They target founders and protocols, present lawsuits, and speak rules about the industry.

It is a question of whether crypto will ever come out and vote, but it is worthwhile for Selkis to run. The industry can’t tell itself the same story, it has to come true. As Rorty said about Disagreement (in a perfect world):

“Such a person would never have come to mind whether Disagreement is central or marginal to the then cultural or political life. She would only question whether Disagreement did good, whether it contributed to the success of some of the campaigns in which it participated.”

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