Financial Nihilism

Financial nihilism is everywhere and subconsciously pervades our entire lives. Here are a few interesting pieces that discuss this:

• Epsilon Theory - Financial Nihilism
• The Meme Coin Rebellion - A Bold Thesis
• Cryptocurrencies: Financial nihilism: The end of faith in the real value of money | Economy and Business | EL PAÍS English
• Financial Nihilism and Determining Value with Demetri Kofinas – Steve Sanduski
• Demetri Kofinas and Grant Williams on Financial Nihilism
• The Scandal of Financial Nihilism - Luke Burgis Newsletter
• Financial Nihilism and Bitcoin Explained | HackerNoon

The common theme here is that cryptocurrencies are both the outlet and mimetic trigger for explosive financial nihilism that launches supercycles of intense speculation - a hypermanic boom-bust cycle. This is interesting - original cypherpunk cryptocurrency impulses particularly in the early era of the Bitcoin project, were a critique of the arbitrary nature of State control of issued coinage and currency. Digital money was meant to be primarily a vehicle for p2p agorism rather than one for wild speculation born out of disillusionment with conventional finance.

Another area of exploration is that although theorising around mimetics and memes in a cultural sense outside of biology has existed for decades, it has only arguably only really gained traction due to successive supercycles of memecoin excess since 2008. There is a connection worth exploring between the degree of financial nihilism present in a culture and the vulnerability and susceptibility of the local populace to mimetic priming. A culture with a healthy sense of financial optimism so to speak may not be so vulnerable to mimetic warring.

Satoshi's dream of digital money fades as Bitcoin becomes the object for speculative fancy fuelled by spook-adjacent cultural phenomena like Saylorism that seeks to make it purely an "asset" that can do its part in a larger universe of asset-manager ETFs basketed along other goods like gold, silver and stocks in propping up Dollar Hegemony.

Financial nihilism is key I think to understand the contemporary attraction to cryptocurrency and allows us to map how far these cypherpunk projects and aspirations have decayed over time because there was not enough active work done to protect its cultural identity and formation. More work must be done to understand the spiritual and psychological framing of financial nihilism beyond materialist considerations of it being a child of the Great Financial Crash of 08-09. Boomer hyper-financialism still pervades diaspora discourses.

Islamicate responses to financial nihilism must go beyond goldbug analyses which have clearly failed. The archives of Satoshi and his contemporaries and peers must be raided. The era of private American communal banking prior to the establishment of the Federal Reserve another fertile area of exploration.