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The Culture Journalist

The broken promises of neo-leftist crypto

Jun 20, 2024
07:46
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

This week, we’re traveling back in time to explore a facet of the pandemic-era crypto goldrush that all but entirely escaped the attention of the mainstream media: The rise of the “Marxist VC.” This was, if you’re unaware, the strange blip in recent history where a contingent of uber-capitalist investors, founders, and other Web3 evangelists leveraged pseudo-Marxist and pro-labor rhetoric (along with cogent critiques of Big Tech) to induct artists and leftists into the world of NFTs and DAOs. Technology and music journalist Eli Zeger, author of a recent essay called “Owner’s Remorse” for the publication Strange Matters, joins to discuss how the capitalist class hijacked the discussion around building a more democratically owned and governed internet, the plutocratic realities that buzzwords like “squad wealth” and “the ownership economy” obscure, and what it’s actually like to work for a DAO (Hint: In most cases, it’s more like working for Uber than a co-op). 

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