Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche
breakermag.com
breakermag.com
Article is worth it for that line. What an outstanding description of my childhood and likely the childhood of half this site's visitors.
Almost everything wrong with tech (at least socially) can be laid at the feet of what it's like to grow up as an overly smart over-educated nerd. If I were contracted by an evil genius to design a brainwashing program to turn kids into sociopaths, I'd just design something exactly like my experience in public school. There's a special kind of head fuckery that you get from being constantly told by adults you're superior while at the same time getting beaten, ignored, and humiliated by most of your peers. I spent most of my late teens and early 20s on a semi-deliberate quest to deprogram myself. I like to think I was somewhat successful.
Don't read this looking for insights about Bitcoin, any more than you'd read DFW's article for insights about being retired. This is a fish-out-of-water story, and those kind of stories are best when they're about the fish itself, not about the water of lack of it.
I thoroughly got exactly what I wanted: the exact same shilling I expected from these fake-intellectual, tax-evading bros.
Integrity and professionalism bordering on zero.
Absolutely not. You are considering she's there as a journalist to produce and informative piece of news. She's there as a writer to produce a feature about how does it feel to be in one of these cruises.
By your standards, all gonzo journalism or, for that matter, any piece of new journalism is unprofessional. That is just plain absurd. The reader knows she is writing from a personal point of view and should be capable to understand what that means in the context of the experience.
That’s a well crafted line right there.
The author really hasn't been paying attention if she failed to realize it is the pet funding model of drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, and money launderers, and only instead opted to use it to mock the political spectrum she doesn't agree with. This article is poor journalism at best.
I can't believe someone paid the author to go on this cruise and to write such shoddy work. I'm not a fan of the cryptocurrency space, but I had to stop reading this -- it was a Im-better-than-you hit piece to justify the paid trip.
> I had to stop reading this -- it was a Im-better-than-you hit piece
Does the later choice of focus on the connection between bitcoin and, to quote, 'libertarian-shading-to-far-right` thinking render the observations she makes, on a cruise catering apparently to many people of that mindset, invalid?
Instead, the point seems to have been to pay a writer who didn't know much about it to go on the cruise and write about what happened. The only real qualification needed for this sort of piece is being able to talk to people and write well.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece precisely because she did describe the dystopian soup of all of the above that decentralisation and distribution has given us. If anything you should have walked away from this article with the realisation that, thanks to it all, we can no longer truly organize ourselves into such narrow little boxes of prejudice.
I'm guessing you didn't make it to the end of the article? I'll save you a tap on the back-button, and quote the part that I think you did yourself a disservice by missing:
"But it’s also the case that no amount of mathematics can delete human prejudice, and no ledger can logic away human cruelty. If the crypto community hasn’t realized that yet, it soon will."
This is probably the wisest thing I've ever heard anyone say, ever, who has had even the slightest contact with crypto-culture.
> Since when has it been the case that the far-right are never drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, or money launderers?
Since when has it been the case that the far-right are always drug dealers, ransomers, scammers, or money launderers?
The political inclinations of these people are a factor, but not the sole reason. 1 + X = 2, only if X = 1. There are many more reasons why such as trip would attract scumbags and political idealogies aren't the whole story.
Left/right is a different political spectrum to libertarianism, totalitarianism, communism, liberalism etc. Fascism is closer to totalitarianism (which is the polar opposite of libertarianism), but is far-right.
But these things are not incompatible. Far-right scammers, drug dealers, scammers, etc. exist. So do far-left versions of the same. So it really isn't relevant to their (shshhdhs) criticism, and thats the point I wish to make.
It seems to me that shshhdhs is only complaining about the authors political views with regards to this cruise, because they are incompatible with shshhdhs's views of the same, and that shshhdhs is making the statement that crypto- is more the domain of drug-dealers, etc. therefore "it can't be all far-right people in the scene". I merely wish to point out that if you're left-, or if you're right- wing, you can still be a bad person for other reasons: drugs, ransom, scams, etc.
Crypto- is an equaliser, and that is really the big point. Ones political ideology is irrelevant to the technology - its just as useful for people who wish do good, however they define 'good' as it is for those who do things others think are 'bad', for whatever that definition may be.
The authors own conclusion - the very last sentence of the article - demonstrates that she gets it: it doesn't matter what your political views, crypto- is going to let you continue to espouse them, whether they are good or bad. Maybe thats offensive to some, but it doesn't seem to me that it bothers the author that much. What seems to bother her, is the rampant sexism that she observed, and I concur with her statement that it seems technology is never going to solve this. Only humans will.
This is how this level of journalism works: CyproCruise has a promotion budget. That budget includes "free" tickets for journalists. They offer these tickets to hip/cool outlets but, as this is a cruise, they need the name of the journalist before actually sending the ticket. So hip/cool outlet sends bio/headshot of the journalist they want to send.
She is admittedly short, petite, young and has cool hair. In her headshot she probably looks 22. Boxes ticked. Cryptocruise sees her both as another attractive female and, being misogynist pigs, thinks her incapable of doing any real damage. So she gets the ticket. Whether her bosses tell her they have paid for the ticket, or that it has been provided, we can never know.
Everyone got what they thought they wanted. Cryptocruise got another attractive female on their boat, and at a discount. News outlet got what they wanted: a colorful description of exactly how misogynist crypto has become. And we readers go our thing too: I actually read the entire article. It reinforced my understanding and assured me that cypto is not long for this world, at least in its current form. Everyone got their thing and made a few bucks doing so. That's how journalism works.
[Think of how awful the article might have been. Imagine if they had sent a 45yo hetero guy, someone who might have fallen in with a very different crowd on this boat.]
If I'd gone I'd definitely have tried for the McAfee interview. As it was I just made sure Laurie had read my book first.
(of course we know each other, it's the worldwide SJW conspiracy)
Plenty of thought leaders in crypto were not on this cruise. It's easy to cherry pick your opinions from one event where people behave poorly.
> This article is poor journalism at best.
Not all articles need to be ProPublica investigative journalism. There's no shame creating well written, entertaining, lighthearted content, even if it's not 100% accurate.
The ultimate irony of labeling anyone ideologically different "*-ist" being itself a form of bigotry is lost on them.
So, it all lines up for me.
I don't know why anyone pays attention to her.
There weren't many ICO's that raised nine figures. In fact most of them had a cap far below nine figures.
Other people, however, may hold journalism to higher standards than those of infotainment that falls terribly short of the "info" part of the portmanteau.
What an amateur. No wonder he only won one Pulitzer.
Where is the big dirt she keeps alluding to? Are we just supposed to hate them by default for being rich and white and male and schlubby and tasteless?