Who Goes Crypto?
Metadata
Highlights
- “The pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where ‘getting rich quick’ is less an American pathology and more the best bet for a stable life.” The side hustles, as it turns out, haven’t been working.
- The rich have figured this out. In the past decade, according to Justin Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness, the number of ultra-wealthy (people with at least a $30 million net worth) have grown rapidly at a rate of almost 10 percent a year with most of the new entrants minting their status through finance, investments, and banking work. According to 2017 analysis by the data firm Wealth-X a clear plurality (14.5 percent) of the ultra-rich attained their wealth in finance, banking, and investments. Meanwhile, the financial situation has more or less remained stagnant for most other people, while things keep getting more expensive.
- Even though they stand to potentially get screwed in markets, retail investors have realized that they’re screwed if they don’t invest either. “People my age and older look at Robinhood, crypto, etc. with some disdain. They complain about ‘the financialization of everything,” Mat Dryhurst, an artist, researcher and co-host of the technology and art-focused podcast Interdependence, told me. “But I’ll talk to the 20-year-old students that I teach at NYU, who grew up with Instagram, and they look at me like ‘where the fuck have you been?’”
- “Investing has become our language for all kinds of things. Including consumption. We talk about ‘I think I’m going to invest in a good pair of hiking boots’ instead of just saying ‘I’m going to ‘buy them,’” Brown elaborated to me over the phone. Words like “invest” aren’t being integrated into our life just because financial ideology is ubiquitous—our use of them reveals the moral value that we imbue onto finance.
- “Every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves,” is being transmogrified into “a specific image of the economic,” Brown noted in Undoing the Demos. By becoming miniature venture capitalists and hedge funds, we fulfill the logical progressions towards being homo oeconomicuses in which, as Brown puts it, “all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.”
- In this way, as finance becomes personal finance, personal finance just becomes the personal. Your Dogecoin or Ethereum Classic is just who you are too. And if you think that’s dumb, because Dogecoin and Ethereum Classic have no point beyond being vehicles by which people trying to get rich though, that is exactly the point.
Who Goes Crypto?
Metadata
Highlights
- “The pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where ‘getting rich quick’ is less an American pathology and more the best bet for a stable life.” The side hustles, as it turns out, haven’t been working.
- The rich have figured this out. In the past decade, according to Justin Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness, the number of ultra-wealthy (people with at least a $30 million net worth) have grown rapidly at a rate of almost 10 percent a year with most of the new entrants minting their status through finance, investments, and banking work. According to 2017 analysis by the data firm Wealth-X a clear plurality (14.5 percent) of the ultra-rich attained their wealth in finance, banking, and investments. Meanwhile, the financial situation has more or less remained stagnant for most other people, while things keep getting more expensive.
- Even though they stand to potentially get screwed in markets, retail investors have realized that they’re screwed if they don’t invest either. “People my age and older look at Robinhood, crypto, etc. with some disdain. They complain about ‘the financialization of everything,” Mat Dryhurst, an artist, researcher and co-host of the technology and art-focused podcast Interdependence, told me. “But I’ll talk to the 20-year-old students that I teach at NYU, who grew up with Instagram, and they look at me like ‘where the fuck have you been?’”
- “Investing has become our language for all kinds of things. Including consumption. We talk about ‘I think I’m going to invest in a good pair of hiking boots’ instead of just saying ‘I’m going to ‘buy them,’” Brown elaborated to me over the phone. Words like “invest” aren’t being integrated into our life just because financial ideology is ubiquitous—our use of them reveals the moral value that we imbue onto finance.
- “Every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves,” is being transmogrified into “a specific image of the economic,” Brown noted in Undoing the Demos. By becoming miniature venture capitalists and hedge funds, we fulfill the logical progressions towards being homo oeconomicuses in which, as Brown puts it, “all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.”
- In this way, as finance becomes personal finance, personal finance just becomes the personal. Your Dogecoin or Ethereum Classic is just who you are too. And if you think that’s dumb, because Dogecoin and Ethereum Classic have no point beyond being vehicles by which people trying to get rich though, that is exactly the point.
Who Goes Crypto?
Metadata
Highlights
- “The pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where ‘getting rich quick’ is less an American pathology and more the best bet for a stable life.” The side hustles, as it turns out, haven’t been working.
- The rich have figured this out. In the past decade, according to Justin Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness, the number of ultra-wealthy (people with at least a $30 million net worth) have grown rapidly at a rate of almost 10 percent a year with most of the new entrants minting their status through finance, investments, and banking work. According to 2017 analysis by the data firm Wealth-X a clear plurality (14.5 percent) of the ultra-rich attained their wealth in finance, banking, and investments. Meanwhile, the financial situation has more or less remained stagnant for most other people, while things keep getting more expensive.
- Even though they stand to potentially get screwed in markets, retail investors have realized that they’re screwed if they don’t invest either. “People my age and older look at Robinhood, crypto, etc. with some disdain. They complain about ‘the financialization of everything,” Mat Dryhurst, an artist, researcher and co-host of the technology and art-focused podcast Interdependence, told me. “But I’ll talk to the 20-year-old students that I teach at NYU, who grew up with Instagram, and they look at me like ‘where the fuck have you been?’”
- “Investing has become our language for all kinds of things. Including consumption. We talk about ‘I think I’m going to invest in a good pair of hiking boots’ instead of just saying ‘I’m going to ‘buy them,’” Brown elaborated to me over the phone. Words like “invest” aren’t being integrated into our life just because financial ideology is ubiquitous—our use of them reveals the moral value that we imbue onto finance.
- “Every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves,” is being transmogrified into “a specific image of the economic,” Brown noted in Undoing the Demos. By becoming miniature venture capitalists and hedge funds, we fulfill the logical progressions towards being homo oeconomicuses in which, as Brown puts it, “all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.”
- In this way, as finance becomes personal finance, personal finance just becomes the personal. Your Dogecoin or Ethereum Classic is just who you are too. And if you think that’s dumb, because Dogecoin and Ethereum Classic have no point beyond being vehicles by which people trying to get rich though, that is exactly the point.