This one took a few paragraphs to get going but the couple minutes of entrance blather proved essential to the core message. Your mileage may vary.
From Real Life Magazine:
Property Values
Creating more owners doesn’t make for collective ownership
In a June 17, 2004, address to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, U.S. President George W. Bush laid out the economic vision for his second term: “You and I know this, that if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country.”
These words summed up the slogan that was supposed to define his legacy: “the ownership society.” With a range of policies across housing, health care, welfare, and finance, the goal was to increase the proportion of asset holders in the U.S. population, with a particular emphasis on homeownership. This scheme, as Naomi Klein argues in this 2008 essay, was straight out of the conservative politico-economic playbook. By encouraging private asset ownership, Bush and his allies hoped to promote a model of the citizen as self-reliant speculator, taking charge of their future by optimizing risk and reward across a personal asset portfolio. This, they believed, would not only result in a smaller state and a more dynamic private sector but also create a new generation of Republican voters, just as Margaret Thatcher had grown her electoral base by privatizing large swathes of the UK’s public housing stock in the 1980s.
Ownership ideology frames a citizen’s rights as realized not inrelation to the state or their community, but through the marketBush’s stated aim was to raise American homeownership to unprecedented heights, including the creation of 5.5 million new minority proprietors. Since he was obviously not about to countenance any kind of redistributive state intervention, this ambition was only ever going to be achieved through debt. From early in his first term, Bush exhorted builders, real estate agents, and mortgage lenders to “dismantle barriers and create greater opportunities for homeownership.” Simultaneously, lenders began to accelerate the practice of offering low-rate teaser mortgages to high-risk borrowers. These “subprime” mortgages were bundled into complex financial instruments, which became the object of highly leveraged speculation among investment banks, setting the fuse for the global financial crisis of 2008.
In Anglo-American society, the homeowner has long been presented as an ideal capitalist subject, equally a dutiful provider and a prudent investor. Owning your home promises security, autonomy and prosperity; the availability of these qualities on the housing market compensates for their lack elsewhere. Instead of economic redistribution, everyone who can afford the initial stake can try to build wealth by owning property; in lieu of an authentically democratic polity, we can express our social and economic preferences through investment decisions. Ownership ideology frames a world in which the rights of the citizen are realized not in relation to the state or their community, but through the market.
For the Bush administration, this ideology was not merely an end in itself, but a way to incentivize consumers to engage with a predatory financial system, presenting adjustable-rate mortgages not just as leg-up onto the property ladder but a way to rapidly build household wealth. Buyers were lured into a labyrinth of financialized debt, yielding a constant stream of junk assets to feed Wall Street’s desire for ever more extravagant margins. For the millions who faced foreclosure in the aftermath of the crash, proprietorship turned out not to mean stability and independence, but penury and dispossession.
Thirteen years on from the end of the Bush regime, the “ownership society” feels more than ever like a sick joke. A significant portion of U.S. housing stock is currently owned by institutional investors, whilst for minorities and millennials of all ethnic backgrounds, homeownership remains a pipe dream. Meanwhile, the effects of long-term housing inequality have been aggravated by the pandemic, leading to a new wave of evictions. Asset ownership in the U.S. is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest 10 percent; globally the picture is even more grim. The “ownership society” leveraged a popular desire for economic independence into a confidence scam carried out on behalf of the financial elite.
This is essential context for understanding the emergence of Bitcoin and the expanded universe of crypto-schemes. As political theorist Stefan Eich, among others, has argued, Bitcoin is explicitly a post-crash phenomenon, animated by the fantasy of a digital money whose value would be insulated from the state and financial institutions that so catastrophically mismanaged the 2008 crisis. Notoriously, Satoshi Nakamoto’s inaugural entry on the Bitcoin blockchain contains a reference to the January 3, 2009, headline of the Times newspaper, which announced that the UK Chancellor was considering a second bailout of the nation’s ailing banks. This crypto Easter egg signals the core preoccupations of Bitcoin’s mysterious founder and its libertarian early adopters — finding a way of protecting their money from the inflationary activities of government and developing a system of digital property rights that exists outside institutional systems of authority and trust.
More recently, this cyber-Hayekian vision has been displaced by alternative blockchain futurisms designed to appeal to a less fanatical constituency. Currently, the most hyped of these is “Web3,” which promises to replace the rentier monopolies of Amazon and Facebook with decentralized networks of open-source applications, built on a foundation of blockchain and crypto. This is a timely proposition. Pandemic conditions have only re-emphasized the baleful grip these corporations hold over our lives. The desire for a more egalitarian alternative to Web 2.0 chimes with the growing prominence of platform cooperativism as well as with the wider movement for workplace democracy and worker ownership.
The trajectory of a great many NFT projects suggests that cryptoeconomics is better at incentivizing boosterism than long-term work
In terms of rhetoric and branding, the ceaselessly upbeat, community-focused Web3 discourse couldn’t be more different from the right-wing accelerationism that underpinned the original Bitcoin movement. Venture capitalists Jesse Walden and Li Jin have touted an “ownership economy” that uses the affordances of blockchain technologies — decentralization, composability, permissionless-ness and so on — to reorganize the digital economy away from centralized platforms and toward quasi co-ops run by users, creators and developers, who share both decision-making responsibility and profits. In this new world, creators will be empowered to “own the means of production and distribution,” producing a new politico-economic settlement in which capital and labor are “one and the same.”
From the “ownership society” to the “ownership economy” — the echo is suggestive. To its advocates, Web3 is the solution to rentier monopolies, mass precarity and the whole necrotic legacy of the Bush years....
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