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“What does the future hold,” is a question we ask a lot. Partially because we’re human and partially because right now we’re in the Polycrisis. I think about it due to my humanity, due to the chaos, due to concern for people, and of course a healthy level of paranoia. I’m not living in the future I was promised or anything close, and I’d ask to see the manager but it’s sort of me.
So what do I think the future is? The future is planning to use Bitcoin after the apocalypse.
I’m not a fan of cryptocurrencies – there’s some interesting technology in there, but overall it’s not so much a money as a kind of stock with little foundation. It’s a kind of social engineering with no foundation but belief. However I do follow news and conversations on crypto as it is part of our current world and affects us. One conversation I followed had someone expressing utter frustration with a crypto enthusiast: said enthusiast said Bitcoin would be great after the apocalypse.
Think of that for a moment. An actual human said that. A person who in theory can drive and hold responsibilities figures that you’ll use Bitcoin when society collapses.
The fall of civilization. You probably don’t have a computer, you probably don’t have the internet, and an entirely electronic currency is your hope for the apocalypse. It was watching faith in gold transferred to faith in the blockchain, completely disconnected from the reality of civilizational crises.
Planning using Bitcoin in the Apocalypse is a perfect summary of where we are now – hoping utter faith in nothing saves us.
We’ve got a world in crises – climate change, political meltdowns, diseases, resource issues, microplastics, etc. Even though I have a lot of faith in humanity, it seems pretty clear we’re in for a hard crash. We need real ideas, real leadership, and real solutions involving material subjects like food, location, weather.
But a lot of people are absolutely enchanted with technical and philosophical bullshit. Crypto of course, which I heard best described as “having a computer do sudokus you use can use to buy heroin.” AI is supposedly going to save us, say the people whose job is to sell us on AI. Meanwhile both technologies suck up technology, resources, and mindshare when we might want to use all that to deal with climate change.
We’re following “leaders” who sound like image board teenagers and 80’s sci-fi novels on repeat, lost in their own worlds. Or maybe we have leaders who are recycling bigotries and biases of the past, while promising we’ll get back to that past even though it existed largely in our imaginations. We’re trying to go back to the 1950’s or the 1850’s or hell, the 1050’s for some people, and few if any of the advocates seem to know anything about real history.
We end up with people who are happy to bring polio back and think advanced technology just happens.
So much of our world is bullshit ideas and bullshit people who aren’t anything, just things we clap our hands for, hoping they’ll be real this time. Believe enough in everything that we know isn’t true and magically we’ll all be saved. The Final Judgment delivered by a god speaking in internet memes and platitudes.
We’re metaphorically hoping crypto will save us in the apocalypse. We’re hoping a teetering pillar of belief and hype will right the wrongs – while it burns real resources and kills real people.
And ultimately, no, it’s not going to work. I watched parts of LA go up in smoke, Arizona has it’s own dangers in 2025, and Florida and its neighbors get rammed with more and more hurricanes annually. We need solutions, we need to prepare, and even the con-men and con-women have conned themselves into acting like it’ll be OK.
Humanity will get through it. But the question is how well, how many, and how long it takes us to establish a functional world. But the answer isn’t hand-wavy, easily exploited memethink.
Steven Savage