"Crypto" is Dead

So it's a pretty good time to get into "crypto"?

Some important announcements first:

• We can only guarantee availability of tickets to The Mars Review of Books White Party if you purchase by Aug 15th. Ticket link here. Use code BLACKMONDAY for 10% off through this Friday at midnight.

• The below post is about technology and art. It’s clearing the ground for more posts about a collaborative art project called Lil Skribblers. Lil Skribblers are currently being dealt pre-sale. The public mint will be August 20. Get in touch if you’d like to get in on the pre-sale.

• I’m consulting with some folks about an Urbit “shrub” (an app, in normal terminology) that will allow you to use Lil Skribblers to access both digital and IRL events. It’s an exciting prospect. More soon.

• All paid subscribers to the MRB get a free Lil Skribbler. If you’re a paid subscriber, and you haven’t done so already, send me an ETH address as a reply to this email. I’ve also said the MRB completists who post a picture of all five MRBs get five free mints. You have until Aug 15 to get in on this and send me an ETH address. There are a few copies left of, Issue 1 and Issue 2 and I’ve re-listed them for sale, but they’re pricey.

• My first novel, Stop All the Clocks, will be published in the summer of 2025 by Arcade Publishing. My nonfiction book on perennialism, The Mystagogues, will come out from Arcade some time after that. More on these books soon.

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I recently mentioned a forthcoming project called “Lil Skribblers.” What is it? Lil Skribblers is, simply, an art project—nothing more, nothing less. That is to say: It is the most valuable thing in the world. I don’t only mean in some touchy-feely art is good for your soul sort of way (although I agree that it is good for your soul). I mean that art is now the most economically valuable thing in the world. Let me explain.

It is common in certain tech circles to wonder what the big use case for “web3” or “crypto” will be. Assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are still priced as valuable (despite this past weekend’s market crash). But to what end? What will the products be? Bitcoin is not yet used as currency, and alternative systems such as Ethereum and Solana seem to be used for little more than gambling. For years proponents of these technologies have been claiming they will have real uses. Where will these uses emerge?

Oddly enough, they’ve already done so. We simply haven’t noticed it. Or, we haven’t connected the dots. People with interests in technology can sometimes err on the side of being, well, technical. They’re looking for the systems architecture that will push nascent software into the mainstream. And they sometimes forget that society itself is more complex and powerful than any technology man can dream of. That is to say, these use cases have arrived in the form of the financialization of ideas. I wrote about this a bit in my last post. I’m talking here not only of memecoins but of all that they augur.

In the post linked above, I wrote about how the assassination attempt on Donald Trump immediately launched a dozen digital tokens which quickly rose in price. Of course, the price also quickly fell. This is the trajectory of most such projects: a sharp rise before a decline to near-nothing. But this is not the case for all. It is not the case, for instance, for Bitcoin. In fact, from the time of its launch, Bitcoin had been the best performing asset of the ensuing decade.

A “Bitcoiner,” i.e. a major proponent of Bitcoin, might argue that Bitcoin should never be compared with scammy memecoins such as those that are launched daily on the upstart blockchain, Solana. Bitcoin was created to hold the ideal properties of a digital currency that cannot be debased: It is scarce (only 21 million total bitcoin will ever exist) and designed such that rewards are randomly awarded to those who spend their computing power on maintaining the system, so that power and wealth in the world of Bitcoin is decentralized. These are good technical qualities, and I happen to agree that they make Bitcoin an attractive prospect as a digital currency.

But the fact remains that Bitcoin is valuable largely because it is perceived as valuable. Because it is open source, someone could clone Bitcoin’s code and make an exact replica. (This has already been done several times.) If one were to do so today, the digital asset in question would be worthless—even though technically identical to Bitcoin—because of a social agreement that the original Bitcoin is the one people ought to put their money into. In this limited sense, Bitcoin too is a memecoin.

Another kind of detractor of memecoins or financialized ideas—the dreaded “no-coiner” in crypto jargon—might argue that none of this peer-to-peer, decentralized architecture is necessary for such meme-based projects at all. Your holdings could simply be entries in a centralized database, just as your social media accounts are entries in a centralized database (which can be deleted at any time), and just as your bank balance is simply an entry in a centralized database (which can also be deleted at any time—just ask this guy). This criticism is technically true, especially for more recent crypto projects. The memecoin trading on Solana, for instance, could probably have been done in a casino without blockchains at all. But, technically true is not the same as true.

Psychologically, anyone who holds cryptocurrency knows that, if need be, he could move it off of an exchange and into a location accessible only to himself. And this is the first time this has ever been true for a digital asset: It is a genuinely new technology. So, whereas much of landscape could indeed be mirrored in a completely centralized manner, the blockchain becomes the Schelling Point—a de facto meeting hub—for anyone who wants to create a financialized idea.

Julian Schnabel in Montauk

The above few paragraphs might sound pretty technical for those of my more literary readers who are less familiar with these subjects. But actually these paragraphs simply describe a new iteration of a process that has always existed. For millennia we have had a field of activity in which a person or group creates an idea, and the idea itself is considered valuable and remains valuable. That field of activity is called art.

Now, of course, art is not only ideas. It is also skill and execution. But ideation, as opposed to technical skill, has become progressively more important over the last 100 years or so. To understand why, read Walter Benjamin’s classic “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Whatever you make of the details, Benjamin’s central thesis was obviously true: In an age in which images can be reproduced at trivial cost, skill in executing such images becomes less valuable.

And yet there are still successful artists, and paintings and sculptures and such that sell for tens or even hundreds of millions. Why? Part of it is that such works of art are status symbols, part of it has to do with tax avoidance, but the largest part of it is something much more subtle. Take the example of Andy Warhol. He noticed what Walter Benjamin had noticed, yet his insight was more deep, paradoxically, because he was able to remain on the surface. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, Warhol describes an epiphany in which he realizes that a billboard advertisement on the highway is the most beautiful work of art he has ever seen.

Warhol simply had an idea. Art need not be canvas laboriously tended to by a painter; it could be a silkscreen printed by an underling. The artist need not be a hermit toiling away in a garret; he could actively seek fame. He had a very specific way of seeing the world, and he turned that way of seeing into a product. And after some strong resistance, the rest of the world came to see things the way he did, and his products became immensely valuable. They encapsulated his ideas. “This is what happens,” the author and raconteur Fran Lebowitz has said of Warhol, “when an inside joke gets into the water supply.” Owning a Warhol became not only proof perfect that one had assimilated these new ideas, but a way of embodying them—of committing to the new form of life that the artist had envisioned. In this way—and I can’t help but think I’m the only person to have made this comparison—owning a Warhol was rather like owning a Bitcoin.

Because there is no limit to the human imagination, or to the human ability to ensorcel and be ensorcelled, there is no limit to the value of future digital artworks of this kind. To create and market a digital asset as an artwork—the NFT is the common form of this—is social practice art, and though that term was invented decades ago, it has only become truly possible for it to exist in the last few years. In fact, it is possibly the only remaining genuine artistic form. In an age in which digital simulacra have superseded the real, an Instagram post about a book becomes more important than the book itself, or a controversy around a film becomes more important than the film itself. Every discrete object or event is swallowed up by the nonstop reproductions of it. Social practice art, the art of spreading an idea, is thus the only true 21st century art form.

There is a haunting video that has been lately making the rounds on social media. The year is 1995. Bill Gates is explaining to talk show host David Letterman a new project called the internet. Letterman, with quite reasonable objections, shoots down every point that Gates makes about the possibility of the internet’s success. It is all, Letterman and his studio audience agree, silly and overwrought—stuff for nerds or scammers. Gates mentions that some day with the internet Letterman might be able to check in on the baseball game when he’s not in front of his television. “Have you heard of radio?” Letterman chortles. Uproarious laughter from the audience.

Similar language surrounds crypto these days, particularly NFTs. Whereas a few years ago artists were agog with the possibilities of NFTs for changing their artistic practice, any high-minded vision in the space seems to have gone down the drain. Lil Skribblers is a project to return to high-mindedness; in the next post, I will explain how, as social practice art, Lil Skribblers will destroy the sclerotic modernist tendencies of contemporary writers and artists and return us to wholeness, i.e. holiness, in the perennialist tradition. That’s the aim, in any case.

Everyone was saying painting was dead, the artist Julian Schnabel remarked of the post-Pop Art era when he got his start, so it seemed like a pretty good time to be a painter. Schnabel was right. He became one of the richest artists in history. Similarly one can say: NFTs are dead, so it seems like a pretty good time to do an NFT project.