About the writing of Crypto-cacotopia
“Crypto-cacotopia and the perfect self-fulfilling doomsday device” is a short story about a possible future world in which cryptocurrencies and their proselytizers have brought about the fall of fiat and the collapse of the social contract. A lot has been written about cryptocurrencies in terms of their technical and practical shortcomings, and an increasing amount is being written about their environmental dangers, but not much about their potential impact on human relations and society.
It can be read as two largely independent texts - “crypto-cacotopia” (the unitalicised text) and “the perfect self-fulfilling doomsday device” (the italicised text). “Crypto-cacotopia” is the narrative, about one person and their experiences living in this new world (although they are not exactly an ordinary person, being one of the technologists who has become disillusioned with the unforeseen consequences of the new technology they had helped create). “The perfect self-fulfilling doomsday device” is the exposition, starting with some technological and social critique, and ending with an account of how that world came to be.
It was written in 2018, mostly on my daily commute. If parts sound stitled it may be because it was written with a thumb tapping on a mobile phone screen, and if parts sound gloomy it may have been partly due to being squished into an overcrowded train.
The working title was “Strength In Numbers”, but that didn’t really get across the essence of the story. I was then going to call it “Crypto-pocalypse”, but there were lots of references to that term on the internet, so I settled on “Crypto-cacotopia” instead. In a nice twist, “cacotopia” is a term coined by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, who was influenced by many Age of Enlightenment thinkers who in turn wrote about topics such as the social contract.
I sent it off to various publishers in 2019 and 2020, before deciding to self-publish here.
Remember, it is just a story, not a prediction. In fact, by writing about what could happen, I hope it will make it less likely to come true.
UPDATE 1 (15 Apr 2021): I posted the story to reddit, and one of the comments had a link to a similar story written in 2013: I am a time-traveler from the future, here to beg you to stop what you are doing. So I’m not alone in thinking about how things could go horribly wrong.
UPDATE 2 (18 May 2021): I’ve now had my first Distributed Denial of Service attack. Hits came from 92 countries, including from most countries in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It seems some people really don’t like anything negative being said about cryptocurrencies.
UPDATE 3 (20 Oct 2021): I’ve now had my first death threat. It seems that not all cryptocurrency fanatics are of sound mind.