Brett Scott is great.

I agree with what you're saying here, but it makes me sad that the general tenor of bitcoiners is such that you feel you have to trigger-warn them on thoughtful perspectives they might not 100% endorse.

(I'm not saying you did anything wrong, I've done the same. I'm just sad that it seems necessary.)

Great post. This was a large factor in my decision to leave the U.K.

Found myself self-censoring in the face of what is described. As soon as you step off the train in London, it's a constant battle for your own sanity and thoughts. It's an anti-human city.

Great piece. I had a similar feeling when I visited Shanghai and wrote about it here on Stacker News.

This sentence struck me the most as this was the same feeling I got from Shanghai. They're slowly shrinking the realm of human activity that isn't intermediated by a corporately owned platform. The organic is becoming less important than the inorganic. We're becoming cyborgs

"The fintech scene primarily exists for one thing: to help bridge the gap between Big Finance and Big Tech." 🎯

This is one thing will miss a lot on cities as they evolve people tend to forget what happen beyond the entertainment

Also one more thought: I think there is a lot to learn from some of the old school communist writers like Gramsci, the punk scene, and other historical counter-cultures. You don't have to agree with their underlying belief systems or even what they did to get some utility from their mode of analysis. Revolutionary discourse in Bitcoin is a lot closer to these than any kind of Orthodox system (e.g. check the Cypherpunks, The Hacker Manifesto).

The pure capitalist utopia™, without waves of reflection, revolution, revision, is as the author describes: A shitty same-sameness to everything, big tech, control, surveillance, and the narrowing of the revolutionary apparatus to the point of nothing.

This was an amazing read, thanks for sharing.

Is there any major city in the world where we don't see this kind of advertising?

It's hard to disagree.

I often hear reference to London's highest urban density of closed-circuit cameras but there are places I've lived with greater palpability of surveillance. Perhaps, the 'matey propaganda' at work to masquerade the Corporate Maoism.

great text, thanks for sharing.

I agree with most of his points, it's a pretty good analysis of the commodification of social interaction and city spaces, and how that "formality" expresses itself in centralizing everything around corporate nodes. Visa is just his example, the node, on closer look, is of course a bunch of companies that are also sometimes battling out different interests among themselves, but none of these in any way work to decentralize, informalize, or allow free space of connection. So from the outside looking in, as a pleb, it's "put them all in a bag and it it, you'll hit the right one."

It ends on how this centralization and formalization expresses it self, emotionally, as loneliness. Exactly, because what modern neoliberal structures do is separate people from one another to "re-connect" them only through central institutions. Your interaction with others is rhus structured by that order, it becomes that order.

He makes that clear in the end, when he reports that paying cash gets him worried stares by his friends: his relationship is dependent on being a good obedient cog in that machine. All the social outrage campaigns trying to ostracize people from their family and friend networks, make them untouchables be revealing som "shocking" information about them, falls in the same category: don't you dare jeopardize all your social relations by being disobedient to the order of the day.

Just one part of the processes of formalization and centralization, among many, but maybe adding that makes it more connectable for others.