This Bitcoin Talk is Dangerous!: How My Talk Got Censored at BHB 2024

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I was not able to attend the Baltic HoneyBadger 2024 conference where I was invited to give a talk and participate on a bitcoin mining panel. This, sadly, wasn’t the worst part of it! What was worse was that I was censored at BHB. Yes, really. Please keep in mind, that everything I am describing here is my personal opinion of the events as they unfolded and to the best of my knowledge.

The title of my talk was, “Jeff Booth is a Communist”. Because, well, he is in the very best way possible. I explain this in my actual talk. Regardless of what you think about communism, banning a word does not make it go away. To the credit of the conference organizers, they did not censor my talk’s title. Based on my conversations with them, it appears that The Human Rights Foundation’s Compliance Team did.

Yes, compliance team. You read correctly. Don’t believe me? I have receipts. Please keep in mind, when I was invited to speak at the conference, I was not told that I was going to be on an HRF sponsored stage with speech restrictions prior to agreeing to speak there. Nor that the travel stipend was likely from an HRF grant. I would never have agreed to such terms if I had known.

I have to say, I was furious that my title was censored. Censorship is the last thing I would expect at a bitcoin conference. I decided it was best for me to give my talk anyway. Sadly, a day later I learned that my passport had arrived but was missing in the package delivery facility. Long story here that isn’t worth going into, needless to say, I worked very hard to get it back to no avail.

Now that I was stuck in the US and unable to travel, I tried getting a virtual talk to the conference organizers. I was told this was acceptable and that they would find room for it on the agenda and put it on a different stage that HRF was not sponsoring. So, I worked very hard on Saturday to finish my talk and record it. I got a file to the conference A/V person. Sadly, despite being told they would place my talk on the agenda and play it as part of the conference, for whatever reason unknown to me, it was not and I received no explanation for this.

Ben Arc, after learning of what was happening, said he would play it during his LNBits workshop. So thankfully, my talk still played in front of an audience of BHB conference attendees. If you’re bothered that I’ve gone public rather than use background channels, please understand that based on what I was told, it is my belief that HRF’s team made a unilateral decision and made no effort to contact me in private to discuss the content of my talk. Since the courtesy was not offered to me, I do not feel the need to offer this to HRF or BHB.

I am disappointed that the organization that I held in such high esteem and believed was aligned with my commitment to free speech, appears to not share my values. I can’t emphasize enough the disappointment, pain, and sadness I feel over what has happened. I never expected this from an organization that promotes human rights. Free speech is a human right.

I want to thank my friends who supported me throughout this. Especially Ben Arc, who offered me time during his workshop to play my talk. Thank you for supporting me. I cannot say this enough.

The video and talk are posted as part of this article. I will also post them in a separate, standalone nostr article. Thank you for reading this. Please watch the recording of my talk and share it with others.

Baltic HoneyBadger 2024: Jeff Booth is a Communist

Click the image to watch the talk on YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT:

My original intent with this talk was to be a little provocative, but mostly to have a little bit of fun with some ideas I’ve been playing with this summer. Sadly, I’m no longer in a lighthearted mood as this has been a trying week. I was looking forward to speaking in person at Honey Badger, but the universe had different plans. Considering that the universe has chosen to set me on a slightly different path, I think it is most appropriate that my talk adapts to this new path.

In 2008, Bifo Berardi, an Italian philosopher of the autonomist movement, was part of a discussion at the Tate Modern art gallery in London that reflected on the relationship between art, labor, and politics. We know about this discussion because David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, wrote a review.

What Graeber noted was a complete lack of reflection on modern art beyond the 1960s or 1970s. There was an attempt to understand the challenges of the 21st century within the context of the 20th century. But what really stood out was Berardi’s depressing comments about the future. First, you have to understand something about Bifo if you’ve never seen him speak. He’s the most jovial, bouncy-energy, and uplifting, white haired Italian philosopher you could ever witness.

Bifo said–according to Graeber’s recollection, “The twentieth century was the “century of the future.”

But that’s over. In the current moment, which is no longer one of conjunction but of connection, there is no longer a future. Cyber-space is infinite, but cyber-time is most definitively not. The precarity of labor means life is pathologized; and where once Lenin could teeter back and forth from depressive breakdowns to decisive historical action, no such action is now possible, suicide is the only form of effective political action; art and life have fused and it’s a disaster; any new wave of radical subjectification is inconceivable now. If there was hope, it is only for some great catastrophe, after which possibly, maybe, everything might change.”

Depressing right? Bifo was arguing that the future is dead. The 20th century was the century of the future and the 21st century is the century of precarity with no future in sight.To quote Graeber’s review of the talk, “We have come to a point where it is impossible to even imagine projecting ourselves forwards in time in any meaningful way, where the only radical gesture left to us is therefore self-mutilation or suicide.”

(Graeber/Fisher slide)I can’t help but imagine that 2008 was a pivotal moment for thinkers like Graeber and another favorite of mine, Mark Fisher. Mark Fisher was a social critic and best known for his book, “Capitalist Realism”. Seeing the Great Financial Crisis play out as critics of the existing system, in light of the historical failures of the 1960s and 1970s to create revolution to avoid the future that we find ourselves in at that moment, and for some the greatest intellectual thinkers of the 20th century to simply say there was no hope, had to weigh heavy on them.

Which is why I think they rejected the idea that there was no way out. All around in their environment, they saw a future lost, even Fisher acknowledged that the future was cancelled through his analysis of how music and culture as a whole changes after the 1970s. Graeber condenses it into one word: Dreamworld. Meaning that we could only make sense of this lost future through a kind of fantasy, through sci-fi, or literally dreams. Yet, rather than give into the desire to be defeated, they tried to find a way out.

(All possibilities slide) Something that I really like about Graeber, which really isn’t his idea alone, Marcel Mauss made this observation as well. Which is that all possibilities occur simultaneously in our current world. I like this because it reveals the possibility of contradictions that can be exploited for the creation of new opportunities for revolution. It also suggests that the future is not dead, but already here, or at least, the path toward a future that takes us out of this state of precarity is already here.

(Chancellor slide) The reality is that Bitcoin arises from this reality that all possibilities occur simultaneously. All of us are survivors of the crisis that happened in 2008. We’re acutely aware of this event in part because Bitcoin was born during this time. The genesis block is a historical documentation of the most critical aspect. Chancellor on the brink of second bailout. The banks were bailed out, the cycle of capital destruction–or creative destruction–was stifled. Since the recession of the 1970s, cue the website, “WTF Happened in 1971?”, we’ve been stuck. Everyone knows this. Everyone feels this. It’s something like when you walk into a casino, and the stench of cigarette smokes permeates and clings to every fiber it touches. You can’t get it out no matter how much Fabreeze you use.

(Kliman/Marx/Schumpeter slide) If you were to ask Andrew Kliman, a Marxist economist, it’s because the government and Federal Reserve feared the fallout of the business cycle. Maybe you didn’t know this, but Karl Marx, the original Marxist economist, documented this cycle, which he called capital destruction. You might be more familiar with the term creative destruction, defined by the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter. Either way, the natural order of capitalism has been subverted because capitalism is built on a contradiction, which is that it’s very innovative process leads to its own self-destruction. This is actually necessary, so that new capital can be created and capitalism can be reborn.

What happened then was that American government and central bank refused to let this happen. Of course, with the destruction of capital comes a certain amount of economic crisis that affects the value of stocks and employment. If your businesses are leveraged, it might lead to deflation. But if you keep delaying the natural process of capitalism, what you do is set a course for something that could be potentially much worse than a brief crisis that resolves mostly on its own, maybe with some help to keep workers afloat while new capital is created within newer, more efficient industries. A crisis so much worse, that it could destroy not just the economic system, but our ecological system, too. Leaving in its wake a dystopian, technofeudalistic slave world where you indeed own nothing and are happy insofar as you are told you are to believe you are happy while you wear industrial scale face masks because the world is so damaged that it isn’t safe to breathe the air without them.

(Solarpunk slide) This is where we are, headed toward a crisis far worse than capitalism could have ever designed. We’re on course for something much worse than the worst aspects of capitalism. But luckily, the future is already here. It already exists. What we have is the Internet. We have distributed networks. We have peer to peer. We have free and open source software. We have crowdfunding. We have the ability to build mesh networks in a way that we could not do 10 years ago. We have high-speed Internet access that can allow us to locally host most of our content and share it with anyone around the world. We have cryptography. Even though we’re entering a stage that is nothing like the capitalism that Marx or Schumpeter once described, nor the kind of capitalism that workers organized against, which the cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s could not fathom, we still have evidence that we can get through the end of capitalism with the tools that capitalism has provided us.

Bitcoin is a distributed, peer-to-peer monetary system. It takes the cypherpunk beyond the virtual world of the Internet and into the real world. It breaks down the barriers because it is tied to the physical world, not just through its energy use, but through its purchase power. It allows us to transfer and influence the social layer because it is a network that anyone can participate in. Like the Internet and as a result of it, Bitcoin challenges system capture. While mega corporations have managed to capture aspects of the Internet through mega platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and others, we can still build our own platforms and protocols that belong to us and which no one can control. Obviously, Nostr is a prime example.

Bitcoin is in a struggle against system capture, this is especially true at the center of the financial system, Wall Street. So many have cheered the development of Bitcoin ETFs, and the arrival of institutional investors. But I caution against this cheering, because this is only system capture, not revolution. If Wall Street succeeds, Bitcoin will be objectified and commodified in the true sense of the word. It will be packaged and sold back to you in a form that will at the surface feel familiar but will ultimately be a hollow reflection of what it once was.

Yet, because Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, it can at least exist in simultaneous contradiction. Even if Wall St tries to capture Bitcoin, we can still use Bitcoin as it was originally intended. The question is, will the original intent of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system be that which scales with mass adoption, or will it be the reified package that Wall Street sells you? Remember, we can still use torrents to download movies, music, and books for free because it’s peer-to-peer, but most people pay for a Netflix subscription these days.

If Bitcoin is the bridge from the virtual world of simultaneous possibilities that are possible thanks to the revolutionary power of the Internet–which challenges the very fundamental notions of capitalism which are property rights and scarcity–then perhaps we can escape the destructive path that the Federal Reserve put us on.

To do this, we have to focus our efforts on building tools that make it easy to use Bitcoin. If we can empower people to break out of the economic system, then we can empower them to make a new choice. We don’t have to be debt slaves. When we interact with Bitcoin, not just as a store of value but as a medium of exchange, then I think we start to realize the power that it gives us. It gives us a taste of true freedom that exists right now as a possibility alongside the possibility of totalitarianism. Bitcoin must be easier to use. We have scaling issues to deal with still. We need developers to work together, not against each other, toward the goal of bringing Bitcoin to the masses. Along with that, we have to pass along the values that we’ve learned from the Internet. A free and open society is the only way forward. Working in collaboration with each other, with the freedom to participate in certain projects or not, is a powerful lesson in community building. We have to harness the ability of crowdfunding as a way of building communities that transcend our local ones. Cypherpunks write code, but if you can’t write code, then build peer-to-peer communities that are both physical and virtual. We must take the next step forward before it is too late. We must bring the cypherpunk into the physical world.

(Booth slide) Anyway, this talk was originally inspired by my favorite communist, Jeff Booth. It was originally titled, “Jeff Booth is a communist” but the Human Rights Foundation decided to act unilaterally–kind of like one of those state-communist parties that dictate from the top what kind of speech is acceptable–to censor my title. But let me tell you something, if you believe that we need to accept a new system is coming, and that abundance will result from technological deflation while we will make less money but also work less (if at all) for more, then you’re by definition a post-scarcity, post-work, anti-capitalist. Or, better said, you’re into fully automated luxury communism. This isn’t Maduro’s communism. This isn’t Mao’s communism. This is what happens only when capitalism finally out innovates itself to the point that it drives profits toward zero. When abundance is accepted, artificial scarcity–one of the necessary conditions for capitalism to exist–will be destroyed. When workers are no longer part of the production system, then the concept of value, whether from the point of view of the labor theory of value or of subjective value theory, will dramatically change into something that would be unrecognizable and probably incompatible with capitalism. With abundance, private property would also be challenged–another fundamental property of capitalism. Remember how stupid we all thought NFTs were because anyone could hit control+C and download an identical copy of their monkey jpg? That’s exactly what abundance does to artificial scarcity. It makes a mockery of it. It makes a mockery of capitalism.

Embrace your communist side. As Graeber pointed out, we’re already communists. The future is already here.

“We are at a crossroads. What worked before will not work in the future. Technology is moving too fast—and it will only move faster from here. Even if we wanted to, we can’t put the genie back into the bottle. We need to build a new framework for our local and global economies, and soon, or the same technology that has the power to bring abundance to us and our world will instead destroy it.” –Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow