“Welcome to the non-fungible, memeified, cryptodenominated, degenerate future of finance.”
I feel a little attacked. Chuckle. Seriously, there are some key themes that the author riffs upon that I think will be essential to charting the next 50 years.
“[T]he checks closed the door on the old: Gone was an understanding of money as a scarce, quasi-natural resource to be managed disinterestedly by apolitical experts. The question was: What was replacing it? Would MMT’s chartalist view of money as a tool of state power prevail? (The undeniable success of the pandemic cash drop seemed to be a point in its favor.) Or could the crypto-millenarians’ anarchic vision of money backed by cybermetal take the upper hand? (Cryptocurrency had a boom year, perhaps driven by the existential fear that accompanies a global pandemic.) Maybe the Marxists would finally figure out how to abolish the value form? (Don’t hold your breath.)
In the absence of a hegemonic answer to the question of what money is to us, strangeness reigns. Even as money has been injected with new political vitality, its actual life has become more baroque. NFTs and meme stocks and cryptocivilizations aren’t just the products of new technologies run amok or old financial dynamics dressed up in new clothes; they are the morbid symptoms of an interregnum during which the role and identity of money in our lives and politics are shifting.”
[Edit: you can tell I usually read the articles before the comments of others oops point basically already made]