Short Circuits and Seizures

In: Public culture, Volume 35, Issue 2, p. 157-176

Abstract

Abstract
This essay explores the financialization of liberal governmentality through questions posed by cryptocurrency, especially in its relationship with the monetary coding of the globe since Bretton Woods. Contemporary Global South deployments of crypto foreground political performatives that can be characterized as attempts to short-circuit established global configurations. This modality of speedy bypassing, enabling volatility and seizure, fuels processes of financialization more broadly, which accelerate and shorten circuits of profit making and, in tandem, short-circuit democratic political representation. Crypto magnifies the tension between the semiotics of the social contract among nations moored in rights, and that of currency as a global language. Digital-speculative monetization warns that the social contract, a futures contract for a secure and stable future, may approach the aleatory contract of the futures trade.