Anarcho-capitalism is far more extreme than Silicon Valley’s usual brand of technological individualism. For one, the tech sector’s libertarianism is corporatist in its bent, and amenable to government, if in a strongly reduced capacity. And Silicon Valley takes a broader approach to the liberating capacity of technology: Facebook hopes to connect people, Google to make information more accessible, Uber to improve transit, and so on.The ancap worldview only supports sovereign individuals engaging in free-market exchange. Neither states nor corporations are acceptable intermediaries. That leaves a sparsely set table. At it: individuals, the property they own, the contracts into which they enter to exchange that property, and a market to facilitate that exchange. All that’s missing is a means to process exchanges in that market.

A different reinvention is more likely. Instead of defanging governments and big corporations, the distributed ledger offers those domains enormous incentive to consolidate their power and influence. For people like Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr, who’s African American, that might mean even greater exclusion, as the very institutions that locked him out of the voting booth might suppress his transformation into a digital-ledger citizen in the first place.

Or if not, other traumas might yet face citizens like Holloway in a society run by blockchain. A mandated DNA-test could accompany citizens’ blockchainification, allowing their ethnic origins and medical predispositions to become attached to an identity record. Financial assets would also be connected, thanks to an underlying cryptocurrency account through which they make debits and credits. Not to mention all the personal insights already consolidated by services like Facebook.

Businesses might subscribe to this data. Thanks to distributed ledger, it could be used to prevent their automated doors from opening for people whom a smart-contract risk-assessment service rates below a threshold of desirability. Left outside, privately-contracted security robots might deploy ledger-backed ID scanners to sweep loiterers from private property. Once delivered and booked into jails, smart courts could automate sentences based on an automated assessment of future crime potential.

And that’s just America. Imagine how a mature authoritarian state would fare under the rule of blockchain. Is this starting to feel like a Black Mirror episode yet? For Adam Greenfield, the anti-authoritarian left has profoundly misunderstood the corner into which such an ambitious aspiration paints society. “I believe distributed ledger enables the kind of central control they’ve never in their worst nightmares contemplated,” he tells me. The irony would be tragic if it weren’t also so frightening. The invitation to transform distributed-ledger systems into the ultimate tool of corporate and authoritarian control might be too great a temptation for human nature to forgo.

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If this sounds familiar, it’s because contemporary culture has been here before. The existing, comparatively modest surveillance and control technologies in use by Google, Facebook, and their ilk—whose impact on governance we now know all too well—proliferated on the assumption that technology could make life better and more efficient. Nobody chose this life, exactly. People adopted technology in sufficient numbers to allow industry, and the culture that follows it, to conclude that the market had decided what was best.

Likewise, Bitcoin’s triumph hinges mostly on the financial success of speculators who never had any intention of using it as currency, and who appear to have strip-mined it into oblivion in the process. Similarly, blockchain’s future seems tied to the short-term vision of investors and entrepreneurs willing to speculate on a hypothetical, distributed utopia without hedging against the consolidated autocracy it seems equally likely to realize. “This is what happens,” Greenfield says, “when very bright people outsmart themselves.”

Source: Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism – The Atlantic