Of the ‘intelligent’ technologies that service techno-capitalist wealth production, cryptocurrency (of which Bitcoin is its most lucrative type[i]) is, perhaps, the least boundaried and, ideologically, the most ambivalent. Intentioned as a surrogate to the centralised national currencies of most modern states condemned by libertarian-leaning thinktanks as ‘coercive’, non-autonomous, and therefore open to human bias,[ii] Bitcoin emerged as the answer to three decades’ worth of theorising on a “distributed, anonymised” money that could “dissipate control evenly among [its] peers”, while rewarding trust in the network as a ledger of ‘labour’ invested in mining coins.[iii]
Thriving in permissive policy environments where mining machines can be yoked to pre-existing energy sources without government circumscription, cryptocurrency emerges par excellence as the brainchild of a “libertarian ideology of non-governmental monetary policies and the promise of technology to free us from politics”.[iv]
Ten years ago, you could mine Bitcoin from your laptop. A college dorm room computer. Now, entire mining farms are fitted with rigs worth thousands, buzzing with the industry of an engorged colony of mechanical ants. Mining is nothing, if not loud. One data blogging site alleges that mining “sound[s] like Jets [sic] taking off, right next to you”[v]. More conservative estimates maintain that mining is at least as loud as a train station.
In cybersecurity policy experts Samford and Domingo’s contention, there is “no ceiling to the price of Bitcoin”, the resources allocatable to mining seemingly limitless.[vi]
On a blog run by an English expatriate, a headline reads ‘Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable In The Philippines?’. Allegedly, yes. But for all the over-articulated logics of trans-national wealth circulation, England forgets the coruscating effects of humidity, monsoons, lechon fire; the sleeves rolled up to the elbow on the province’s ersatz technician, sipping Coca Cola up a straw from a plastic bag before she cedes the mining rig to the weather. If the cheap prices of electricity whet venture capitalist appetites, then perhaps equatorial overheat might blunt them. Perhaps.
Still, the cost of a decent mining unit—the kind that will make a return on your investment—is at least 103k Pesos, or over 25% of an average salary (a percentage which only increases further from the capital). The gross power exacted from Bitcoin’s algorithmic ledger is more than is used by The Philippines’ 110 million compatriots annually.[vii]
At the end of 2018, the energy used by Bitcoin mining farms superseded the net energy consumption levels of entire nations. Its annual carbon footprint was comparable with that of Denmark. The greenhouse gas emissions produced by Bitcoin farming alone could push anthropogenic climate change past the 2°C Paris Agreement-accorded cap within the next 14 years.[viii] Wealth aggrandisement for the few indexes the encroaching tide at the doorstep of the world’s littoral populations. Coloniality is nothing, if not exacting in its obviousness.
In 30 years, 30% of metropolitan Manila will be underwater. By the time I might merit the moniker ‘old’ or ‘elder’, my memory’s facsimile of Manila—with its vast highways and shopping malls abutting high-rise hotels abutting houses where life is lived in the vice grip of a too-fast capitalism, animated with its plosive inflections nonetheless—will be difficult to square with a metropolis half-subsumed by the Pacific. In 30 years, we will not know the Pasig from the floodwater, the corrugated boundaries of the outhouse watershed from the tide.
Coloniality is nothing, if not in excess.
“The seduction of contradiction”, Xiaowei Wang contends, conditionalises the West’s prurient interest in the aesthetics of the East. The allure of the Asiatic is dioramised into the clash of modernism’s modular kitsch—cell phones, skyscrapers, the information exchange—counterposed against the symbology of the Orient—incense, ancestor worship, bucket bath washes. “Such images and forms obscure life through a dense veil of figures, playing on the symbols that already exist in your mind. A kind of numerical inhumanity takes over.”[ix] The imaginary of the West transplants the lived ‘East’.
In Liu Chuang’s three-channel video installation Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018), birds-eye drone footage surveys the torpid, fast-moving rivers of China’s southwestern highlands, a region covering approximately 2.5 million square kilometres of minority-dominated lands, including Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and parts of Sichuan. According to James C. Scott, the peoples of ‘Zomia’ are socially organised to “keep the state at arm’s length”. China’s efforts to extend administrative discipline and control into nongoverned lands have both caused and pressurised the force with which ethnic minorities have continued to resist centralised rule.[x]
The Anthropocene marks the era of internal colonisations. Mass-democratised technology services the people services the state. China’s incursion into Zomian highlands for hydropower coincides with the growing energy demands of its rapidly expanding urbanised populations, and the development of technologies which render the exploitation of water resources in topologically challenging regions economically viable. The state’s proposed series of dams in the middle and lower reaches of the Nu River in Yunnan Province would, if completed, surpass the power-generating potential of the Three Gorges Dam, thereby fulfilling the Nu project’s mandate to catalyse a shift in coal-based energies towards hydropower.[xi]
Meanwhile, government-owned dams in minority-dominated lands animate China’s project to displace and assimilate non-Han communities into the Han majority. Despite its promises to ‘resettle’ minorities (as if involuntary expulsion could be configured in those terms), “landlessness, joblessness, food insecurity, community disarticulation, increased morbidity, loss of community resources, and depression” haunt China’s half-hearted attempts at ‘compensating’ lost land, income and the very fabric of relationality that sutures together lives already deeply jeopardised by the mechanism of ethnonationalism.[xii] Hydroelectric plants channel energy across the country, fuelling consumerism’s hunger several thousands of kilometres away from its originary territories. Theft and loss undergird this 21st century species of expansionism, “landscape elements [wrested] from previous livelihoods and ecologies to turn them into wild resources, available for industry”.[xiii]
The past decade has seen Bitcoin miners yoke their rigs to Zomian hydroelectric plants (many now semi-abandoned by the government due to the high cost of maintenance), often operated by remote control. Low temperatures, cheap electricity and under-monitored power sources collude to ensure both the access to vast stores of energy necessitated by Bitcoin’s computational quotient and the permissive policy environments of provinces where up to 90% of residents do not speak a national language. In much the same way that hydropower is siphoned from the comparatively low-demand states of the southwest toward urban, metropolised coastal provinces, the trajectories of capital through the cyber-currency ledger offer up “a map for the way value flows out of the landscape through local communities, and toward sites of accumulation far away”.[xiv] Compounding the social and ecological damages eked out by hydropower’s operations—high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, the destruction of life-sustaining crops by siltation and the destruction of cultural heritage sites—the climatological and immediate environmental costs of mining render mined territory unliveable. Mining is at least as loud as a train station. Miners work as unwitting mercenaries of the state’s centuries-long project to extirpate minority sovereignty on ‘resource-rich’ land.
Chuang’s work closes with a montage of daguerreotypes of Mongolian women in traditional wedding dress morphing into images of Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala morphing into daguerreotypes of Mongolian women. The effect is eulogising: science fiction exhausts the capacities of the subjunctive imagination to conjure the passed via the symbology of the still-here. It is Chuang’s contention that Bitcoin mining has supplanted the transhumance lifestyles of Zomia’s peoples: Bitcoin miners move their rigs in time with the fluctuations of the seasons, re-rendering a 21st century technological nomadism. Coloniality is nothing, if not referential.
My maternal inheritance is a particularly bad case of tinnitus. In my grandmother’s province, hydroelectric power plants proliferate just kilometres from her hometown.
Subjunctively speaking, coloniality is nothing, if not loud.
In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, ‘Neo Seoul’ is rendered a floating technoscape underpinned by a deserted Seoul ruined by too-high sea levels. The city’s lurid fluorescents are seductive and manifest in their referentiality: in the throes of climate catastrophe, ‘Asia’ is conjured as a hypermobile technological commons, the ancient ‘old world’ always-already available through Orientalism’s ready simulacra—parasols, kimonos, hypersexualised geisha—counterposed against holographic phantasms, spinners, white women in modular bodysuits. In the novel’s film adaptation by the Wachkowskis, the revolutionary insurgent Hae-Joo Chang who saves and martyrises the fabricant-prophet Sonmi-451 is played by a white man in yellowface. Matte prosthetics mask the angular contours of his Anglo-Saxon jaw, brow and eyelids, producing, were one to temporarily suspend their disbelief, a semi-passable facsimile of a Korean man. Like many of Asia’s mass exports, the Wachowskis’ Hae-Joo reads as a ‘poor copy’. Returning to Wang’s ‘seduction of contradiction’, ‘numerical inhumanity’ produces the ‘Asian’ and ‘Asia’ as capable of wholesale reproduction. The keepsake of the too-similar, too-Other Asiatic haunts the West’s failure to imagine the East as anything other than a zone of social and climatological abandonment.
In one of the film’s ambitious (and, perhaps, failed) chronological leaps, the reincarnated Sonmi-451 is imagined as the cloistered wife of Hae-Joo’s 19th century white abolitionist alter-ego. Safely returned to America after setting down uninvited in Rēkohu/Wharekauri, Hae-Joo-as-Adam Ewing answers his father-in-law’s admonition that his waywardness will “never amount to more than a single drop in a limitless ocean” with the question what is the ocean but a multitude of drops?.
In 30 years, the water will kiss my grandfather’s doorstep as he answers the call of taho and ripe mango. Perhaps the imminent absence of the vendor’s morning call to attention marks a watershed moment in the cloud’s imperative to dematerialise via the real lives of the invisible still-here. If called, his child’s ear might still ring with the chorus of past morning’s transactionalities, its lively interplays, incidental musics.
If called, will the memory of my grandfather as a boy swim out for a Bitcoin?
It is Filipino American History Month and time’s bloody linkages hit my liver. Spam, corned beef, burnt rice bless my plate blessing America with remembrance of aluminium, pig flesh, bayonets. A headline I read today goes ‘Ilocos Sur is helpless against illegal black sand mining’. My grandmother’s country ripe for extractive appetites.
In the territory of her sovereign imagination, my grandmother is rich in rice and bamboo. Old, she is rich in the surrogacy of a memory for a hometown sans the insurgency of colonial capital.
Leron Leron Sinta
Buko ng Papaya
Dala dala'y buslo
Sisidlan ng sinta
As of the publication of this piece, there is no cure for tinnitus. Bitcoin mining is unyielding in its chronological resonances.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to go back to The Philippines.
[i] As of January 2021, the value of all bitcoins in circulation surpassed USD $700 billion, followed by Ether, the digitised currency of the Ethereum network, which is worth over USD $140 billion. Other emergent and less valuable, cryptocurrencies comprise the remainder of cryptocurrency’s net worth of over USD $1 trillion, including Tether at USD $22 billion, Litecoin at USD $11 billion and Bitcoin Cash at USD $8 billion. It is Lally et al.’s contention that Bitcoin “maintains a market capitalization larger than the next 10 currencies combined”.
For more information, see Timothy Lee, “The world’s cryptocurrency is now worth more than $1 trillion”, Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/the-worlds-cryptocurrency-is-now-worth-more-than-1-trillion and Nick Lally, Kay Kelly, and Jim Thatcher, “Computational parasites and hydropower: A political ecology of Bitcoin mining on the Columbia River” in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (2019): 14
[ii] A tension exacerbated by the advent of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, which catalysed the release of Bitcoin, the first blockchain-based cryptocurrency, in 2009. See Jack Parkin (2019) “The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money”, Economy and Society, 48(4) (2019): 463-487
[iii] Lally et al. (2019): 4 and Parkin (2019)
[iv] Henrik Karlstrøm, “Do libertarians dream of electric coins? The material embeddedness of Bitcoin”, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory , 15 (1) (2014): 23–36, doi: 10.1080/1600910X.2013.870083
[v] ChunkyChips.net. “5 Reasons Why We Don't Host Bitcoin Mining”, https://chunkychips.net/blog/5-reasons-dont-host-bitcoin-mining
[vi] Heidi Samford and Lovely-Frances Domingo, “The Political Geography and Environmental Impacts of Cryptocurrency Mining”, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, //jsis.washington.edu/news/the-political-geography-and-environmental-impacts-of-cryptocurrency-mining/
[vii] Ben Deacon, “Bitcoin may soon consume more power than Australia—almost 10 times more than Google Microsoft and Facebook combined”, ABC News, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-18/bitcoin-has-a-climate-problem/13210376
[viii] Camilo Mora, Randi Rollins, Katie Taladay, Michael Kantar, Mason Chock, Mio Shimada and Erik Franklin, “Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C”, Nature Climate Change, 8(11) (2018): 931-933
[ix] Xiaowei Wang, “Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside”, New York: FSG Originals x Logic, 2020
[x] James C. Scott, “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” London: Yale University Press, 2009: x
[xi] Approximately 78% of the China’s energy demands are met by coal-burning. With international circumscription surrounding the state’s disproportionate climate impacts, already “the world’s largest emitter of CO2”, the pressure on the current administration to reduce its global annual carbon emissions is high.
See Philip Brown, Darrin Magee and Yilin Xu, “Socioeconomic vulnerability in China's hydropower development”, China Economic Review, 19(4) (2008): 614-627.
[xii] Brown et al. (2008)
[xiii] Anna Tsing “Natural resources and capitalist frontiers”, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(48) (2003): 5100
[xiv] Paul Robbins, “Political Ecology, Second Edition”, Oxford: Blackwell, 2012: 88
[xv] Nancy Tuana, “Witnessing Katrina” in Alaimo, S. & Hekman, S. (eds.) Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008: 189
[xvi] Wang (2020): 113