Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

The speculative frenzy among cryptocurrency promoters and investors is commonly associated with the financialized worldview of neoliberal realities, financial anxiety, and market positionality. A cultural analysis of Crypto usually conflates the micro-politics of Bitcoin’s currency potential with polysemic narratives of decentralized financial futures, reproducing a commodity view inhering in Bitcoin’s monetary pragmatics, that undermines its potential to spatialize digital democracy through the generative potential of the blockchain. Thus, existing literature on the global diffusion of Crypto-assets offers a disenchanted critique of the fetish character of all Crypto tokens – critiquing its techno-economic imaginaries in light of its this worldly effects. This paper will utilize the extended case method and grounded theory to illustrate that magic, spirituality and quasi-religious ideologies are, in fact, ever-present in the cybernetic ideal of disintermediated trust. Utilizing William Pietz’s problematization of fetishism in the interplay of religious and economic orders of trust, along with David Graeber’s thesis of the social creativity of the fetish, and Jane Guyer’s conceptualization of wealth-in-people, this paper will illustrate how religious, mythological and soteriological ideals are shaping and vivifying the realization of blockchain dreams within certain maker-cultures of Crypto in ‘Digital India’. By analyzing the techno-populist slant of Crypto’s originary cosmologies with the ideological apparatus of spiritual fantasies, social metaphysics, and religious imaginaries in contemporary urban India, I will argue that incompossible iconographies of techno-magic can get deeply embedded within ideals of blockchain disintermediation — thereby re-enchanting the cyberlibertarian ideals of anonymity, privacy and digital integrity as they travel to new media geographies.