The Millennial Imperative for Individual Activism
In 2008, I graduated from high school and headed to UC Berkeley to study engineering. The financial industry was in full meltdown, an endless war was raging in Afghanistan, Obama was running for President for the first time, and BitTorrent was the only way to access movies online (Netflix still delivered DVDs via USPS).
I registered to vote in the election with many of my classmates, and when Obama won, there was a parade in the streets of Berkeley and we threw a party. We had been part of creating a, “Change we could believe in.” Or so we thought…
Some social policies did change for the better. But bank bailouts accelerated; oil companies continued to post record profits; the Occupy movement failed to produce results and degraded into a leaderless, disarray of uncoordinated messaging. In California, “No on 8” became a confusing, but ultimately successful rallying cry for Gay Rights.
As I invested time into trying to understand the issues that were most important to me, I realized that every issue was complex. Rarely were issues black and white. A state proposition on kidney dialysis highlighted this idea for me with the voting materials making it impossible to understand what I was voting for if I checked the yes box or the no box. Each side presented different information, making the truth of the issue difficult to assess. If you could untangle the mess of political messaging, the language of the bill itself was still a nightmare of legal jargon, obfuscating the mechanics of the legislation, and creating a level of convolution that made it impossible for anyone who wasn’t intimately familiar with the issue to understand the actual impact.
The next eight years of the Obama presidency further served to highlight the broken nature of our political system. Every important issue stalled in deadlock. Issues that were rammed through such as Obama Care, fell victim to a vicious political process, rendering them crippled by the time they finally passed. Even issues with overwhelming public support seemed to fizzle out in the legislative process, killed by lobbyists or in back room deals between politicians.
However you feel about Edward Snowden, when he revealed that the NSA was secretly spying on US Citizens (Citizen 4 documentary), my faith in government institutions took another hit. If this spying was important, and truly was what was needed for National security, shouldn’t they be able to make a case to appeal to the American public to pass laws to make this legal, instead of doing it in secret using gray areas of the law?
Glen Greenwald’s TedTalk on “Why Privacy Matters” convinced me of the important role that privacy plays in freedom and innovation, and that by allowing US institutions to conduct spying in secret, we were on a dangerous path towards authoritarian controls like those implemented by China.
I began to despair, that there was no real pathway to improve American systems. That our democracy had been replaced by an oligopolistic system of capitalism. I read an article in the New Yorker about the decent of American democracy into a system of oligopolistic politics, that articulated my fears. The basic premise was that capitalism had transitioned from the American system of economics to our system of governance when corporate political contributions became protected “free speech”. The impact of this was to transform our free-market democracy into an oligopolistic political system in which only corporate entities were in the driver seat. The idea was reminiscent of an article that I had read by Robert Reich while at Berkeley.
As the 2016 election neared, my despair in American politics paired with the fact that I was a California voter, whose electoral votes were already statistically decided made me feel that voting had no impact, so I sat out of the 2016 election.
The night of the election, I watched in shock as Donald Trump rolled to victory, tracking the vote count on a website that showed each possible path to victory for each candidate, and slowly realizing what was happening as Hillary Clinton’s branches to victory slowly disappeared off of the visualization. I watched the jeering victory responses of some, and I watched people in my family cry that night, fearing for the future of the country, and in fact for what it said about the present state of the country.
Personally, I tried to remain objective and optimistic. Yes, Donald Trump seemed like a horrible, shitty person, who would do real damage to the environment and social policies. I was very skeptical about his populist messages, as so many other parts of his campaign seemed to be smoke and mirrors. But if he could really “drain the swamp” and change the political system so that it would reflect the opinions of the general population, I figured that almost any other consequence would be worth it in the short term.
Quickly it became clear that “the swamp” would not be drained, and in fact the swamp creatures would just become more fearsome. We learned about how the Trump campaign had used Cambridge Analytica data to influence voters and create targeted messaging on an individual basis, previously impossible. I wondered if my decision to abstain from voting had been impacted by data that Facebook or Instagram had compiled about me.
I quickly gave up hope that Donald Trump had any intention of changing our political system to align with a populist ideal.
This was my lowest point and my most pessimistic moment for the future of our democracy in the United States. I did not see a path forward.
In the depths of that darkness, I reflected on myself as an individual. Was it my job to work on this problem? What could I possibly do? If I did not believe in the power of voting, did I have any power at all?
Through this reflection and searching I found a bipartisan group called RepresentUS that used publicly available data to research how voter sentiment impacted public policy. The group worked with lawyers to draft local, anti-corruption legislation, and had a plan for how this grassroots effort could one day impact the democratic process on a national scale. This was something I could believe in.
But the geographic impact of the group seemed very small. They were focused on campaigns in rural communities and states largely, so I felt that I didn’t have a big role to play, besides supporting the organization, sharing the content, and following along with the progress in hopes that the ideas would spread.
As time went on, the organization became more politicized, not because the ideals are inherently politicized, I think, but because one political party has more to gain from regulating corruption in politics. Each side might pay lip service to various tools that RepresentUS was advocating (term limits for example, or the elimination of dark money), but each side opposed other fixes, and ultimately what I observed is that political parties were able to sway their voters away from the idea of passing a full set of reforms.
Around this time, the 2017 Bitcoin Bull market had begun. I was familiar with Bitcoin, as it had been on the periphery of my friend group when I was in college. I had even bought some coins many years back, but I couldn’t remember how to access them, and hadn’t thought much about it for a while. When I re-engaged with the Bitcoin community, my interest started out as speculative in nature. I saw the number going up, and made a quick buck, which I then re-invested into a down payment on a house just at the height of the bull market. As a side effect however, I began learning about Bitcoin.
At the time there was very little podcast or YouTube content about Bitcoin, but I could read all about it. I read about how the technology was developed by an anonymous figure named Satoshi Nakamoto who had disappeared, leaving a stack of “sats” now worth billions, locked up in a wallet that no one could access. I read about how Bitcoin had been created in response to the 2008 banking crisis to create a transparent financial system that preserved privacy while making financial flows at banks and in politics less of a black box. I learned about the fixed schedule of mining rewards, the difficulty adjustment, the halving cycle and the mechanics that would prevent the manipulation of the currency to fund wars. I learned about how decentralizing money and decoupling it from sovereign governments could empower third world citizens to fight human rights abuses.
The deeper I went, the more I realized that so many of the issues of our capitalist system of government could only begin to be addressed through a more fair system of sound money.
Bitcoin was a tool that I could engage with on an individual level that could one day move the needle on so many issues that mattered to me.
When the pandemic hit, we saw an acceleration towards a digital future. Canadian trucker protests, CBDCs, the China ban on Bitcoin mining all reinforced my prior beliefs about the importance of Bitcoin in our increasingly global world.
When China rolled out their CBDC around the Beijing Winter Olympics, it reminded me of the security state that I had heard about from my friends who had attended the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008. At the time, they had noted a number of strange incidents that let them know that they were being monitored by the Chinese government while in China. A shadow detail followed them when they left the Olympic village; electronics like the refrigerator in their dorm rooms would end up mysteriously plugged back in when they unplugged them, despite the fact that no one should have known they had been unplugged; and of course many email communications did not make it through to them during their time in China. With the new CBDC, the Chinese government would be able to track whereabouts without a shadow detail, they could know exactly how you were spending your money, and could discipline their citizens financially for not following the rules.
In the same week that China launched their CBDC, Russia invaded Ukraine, and we saw the importance of Bitcoin as a financial rail for international remittances. While governments debated support measures for the Ukrainian military and people, international outcry prompted Billions of satoshis (millions of dollars) worth of donations to pour into Ukraine in the first week.
In 2024, Joe Biden will be running for re-election, and while I support many of his policies that have been popular with a majority of Americans (Environmental policy, bipartisan infrastructure legislation, abortion stances to name a few), I remain firmly rooted in my belief that our political system is still broken. It does not represent the will of the people, and until the influences of lobbying, dark money, and unlimited political terms can be rooted out, there is no other issue that I can justify voting for.
If you’re not convinced of the importance of this issue, ask yourself a question: do you think that money will become digital in the next decade? The writing is on the wall. China and several other countries have launched CBDCs already. Elizabeth Warren and many other politicians are loudly promoting an American CBDC. Whether Bitcoin wins, or a CBDC, make no mistake, cash will soon be a thing of the past, and digital money will become the norm. If these centralized digital currencies win, the surveillance state wins.
Don’t think that will happen in the USA? See Edward Snowden. Listen to Glen Greenwald’s Ted talk. Right now, the only decentralized alternative to a government run and controlled currency is Bitcoin.
In the last few months, the federal reserve, FTC, FDIC, CFTC, and individual politicians (Elizabeth Warren) have created a system to throttle Bitcoin in the United States, attacking on-ramps, preventing crypto banks from attaining legitimate legal status despite a commitment to enhanced consumer protection beyond those protections offered by traditional banks, and sowing negative public perception against the entire industry.
I think that our government institutions can play an important role in providing consumer protections by ensuring that centralized exchanges are regulated in a fair and legitimate manner. I believe that it is clear that most of the alt coins in existence are securities and should be subject to security laws. But all of this needs to be done through legitimate process, with the support of the public, not through sketchy, unilateral backchannels.
With all of this said, I believe in the importance of voting for candidates who support Bitcoin favorable policies. Joe Biden has remained silent on the issue to a large extent, but his administration has allowed back-room regulation to happen through the FTC and other organizations. In my opinion, it is on him to prove that he is pro-freedom, pro-innovation, and anti-surveillance-state by condemning these actions and setting clear guidelines. Until these are established, I have to assume that his administration supports the actions of their regulating bodies.
In 2016 I had no faith in the power of voting, but the margins of victory in the last two presidential elections have been small, and the Bitcoin community is loud.
We need to be clear about our intentions, to give candidates an opportunity to make the right decision. No matter how confident you are that “your side” will win, we all win if the right policy choices get made.
Do the American people have the power to guide the direction of the country? RepresentUS would say, no, not really right now. But if we can win on this one issue, there may be hope for the future.
Digital Rights are Human Rights. As millennials who grew up in a reality where the digital realm is intertwined with every part of daily life, there is an imperative for us to fight on this new frontier. I urge you to fight for human rights. Fight for freedom to transact. Fight for Bitcoin.