The year of technoligarchy

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The year of technoligarchy<br>0:00/1060.357914<br>1×

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In 2021, crypto was all about hype . Enthusiasts swore the “killer app” was just around the corner — the thing that would finally reveal blockchains’ vast potential to the normies who still couldn’t see the vision. It was suddenly everywhere: Fortune 500s pushed NFT drops and on-chain metaverse wearables; celebrities flaunted Bored Apes as status symbols; crypto firms plastered their names on sports arenas and ran supermodel-fronted ad campaigns. Zero-interest-rate-fueled venture capitalists flung cash at any pitch deck that featured buzzwords like “democratization” and “trustlessness”. Early adopters expected a windfall when the crowds of latecomers poured in, and so they manically tried and tirelessly promoted each new app. “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it — was the chorus, as “communities” sprung up around tokens and apps and assured one another that everyone was going to wind up rich.<br>2022 was the collapse . Prices slid, and businesses built on the premise that “number go up, forever” went with them. The Terra algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg in May, entering a death spiral that vaporized $40 billion. In June, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital blew up, exposing the fragile web of high-risk lending endemic to the industry. As margin calls mounted and lenders demanded repayment, we saw bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. The forced unwinds dragged prices even lower; bitcoin fell more than 60%. The year culminated in the dramatic implosion of FTX, and by Christmas, its CEO and former industry darling Sam Bankman-Fried had been arrested and extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.<br>2023 was the cleanup . Crypto winter dragged on as prices stagnated, users drifted away, and venture capital redirected its firehose to shiny new AI projects. After years of treating the sector as a fringe curiosity that might just go away on its own, regulators began enforcing long-standing financial regulations and pursuing the rampant fraud. I spent the year buried in court documents as I tracked dozens of bankruptcy cases, regulatory enforcement actions, and criminal prosecutions. Outside the die-hards, most people tuned out, believing crypto to be well and truly dead. But within the industry, the previous year’s destruction was reframed as a necessary cleansing that would strip away the froth and fraud to expose the potential they swore was still only moments away from being realized.

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2024 was a year of grievance . Despite the last year’s obituaries, crypto lived on, nursing a grudge and building a political machine. When adoption stalled, executives insisted the problem wasn’t the tech or business models, but “regulation by enforcement”, “debanking”, and a “war on crypto”. The industry threw itself into politics, establishing super PACs with nine-figure war chests, hiring armies of lobbyists, and dispatching executives to Washington to warn that innovation was being strangled and the US could be ceding a technological revolution. Political candidates were assured an unusually engaged bloc of “crypto voters” and a flood of money — so long as they signed on to the industry’s deregulatory wishlist. By summer, crypto had emerged as a topic on the presidential campaign trail. Donald Trump took the stage at the annual Bitcoin Conference and promised to make the US the “crypto capital of the world”. Kamala Harris added an eleventh-hour cursory nod to crypto in her platform documents, suggesting the pressure had reached her, too. And crypto’s aggrieved posture aligned with a broader tech executive class that had begun to cast itself as under siege — whether from antitrust scrutiny, AI safety discussions, content moderation demands, labor organizing, or “wokeness”. Tech leaders increasingly positioned themselves as a nationalist vanguard essential to American supremacy, framing their rightward turn as merely pragmatic. But they were borrowing from authoritarian playbooks: democratic constraints strangled innovation, and regulation posed existential threats to America’s manifest destiny of technological dominance.<br>2025 was the year of technoligarchy . The tech industry’s political investments paid off spectacularly as Trump returned to the White House with a Republican trifecta. Some technology executives secured Cabinet and other advisory roles, and far more were regularly invited to policy- and lawmaking conversations to write their own rules with little concern beyond expanding their power and profit. The...