Making Crypto Mob-Proof in an Anti-Erotic World
#009 Beyond the Math
As I write, the crypto industry is definitely going through some challenging times. What stands out for me is not necessarily the excessive meme coins, rise of stablecoins, internal corruption and exploits from exchanges, but the repetition of an age-old pattern that’s now possessing crypto.
It’s a pattern that’s in the recently released Jeffrey Epstein list. And in the last few weeks I’ve been swept away by a few threads in the art and online worlds that help me make sense of what’s happening. Starting with the film, The Apprentice.
The movie depicts Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor and lawyer who was closely tied to the mob. I highly recommend you watch it. There is no banality.
The ethos of decentralization and its underlying mathematical rules were supposed to be enough this time. Math was supposed to protect the people.
Today, more math in the form of the Nakamoto coefficient, floats around the internet as yet another determining factor that can predict protective chains — those blockchains that can prevent chaos and exploitation.
But we know the truth now in the face of old power. Code ain’t enough.
Full-throttle narcissism doesn’t give a shit about math. It operates as an infectious machine. And it has already infected crypto with its strategy: Exploit, cheat, bend the rules — repeat.
As the old heads aim to maintain power, deploying their playbook’s mobster strategy to absorb crypto — networked or coordinated resistance to such power must invite this awareness, tend to code weaknesses, and note a truth — if on the path to change the world, one’s idea must aim to be mob-proof.
I. The Pattern: Power & Possession
In the 1940s, during World War II, the United States had a huge Mafia problem. To exert its power, all the Mafia had to do was pay off public officials, bribe juries, witnesses, and business leaders. This made the nation weak and highly vulnerable to the Axis powers, and specifically, German and Italian agents in New York. With the threat that America would fall prey, the U.S. teamed up with the rising alt-power, and then it possessed them through a radical plan, code name, Operation Underworld.
While it initially began as the U.S. government’s strategy to enlist both Italian and Jewish criminals to track Axis powers, the success of the program enabled it to evolve, giving the U.S. bundled power within its own borders and more oversight around the world. And establishing the U.S. CIA as the home where the Mafia would ultimately reside.
How does the U.S. seduce the mob into that subordinate role?
Charles “Lucky” Luciano is considered the Father of Modern Organized Crime. He was the mobster at the head of a prostitution ring in New York city, where his crimes earned him a ~50 year prison sentence.
The United States turned towards the lucky pimp, offering him a full pardon in exchange for his help with the operation in World War II.
II. The Blueprint: Popes & Prostitutes
The U.S. president’s drive to support crypto is part of the mission of Project 2025. Of this, fellow Substack author, Justin Foster writes, “Before Project 2025, it was The Powell Memo. Before that, it was The Southern Manifesto. Before that, it was Jim Crow. Before that, it was Manifest Destiny. Before that, it was The Bible. The playbook never changes—just the branding.”
As a former world history teacher, I’ve long known about naughty popes and power patterns. In fact I’ve written about such powers in a previous post. The long short of it is that matrifocal power, not to be confused with matriarchal power, is life affirming for everyone. And balanced powers — matriarchal + patriarchal — are better than imbalanced powers.
But in this gnarly web of complexity, Foster’s stream of memos got me pondering. I’m drawn to excavate the clergy’s playbook. And I’m wondering how it’s now creeping into the decentralized math that was supposed to promise us the cessation of irresponsible central bank policies and hyperinflation, and gift us with an equal economic system.
In her work, The Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici, points to the work of Mary Condren who traces the rise of patriarchal consciousness, and the decline of matriarchal power that has had a serious and terrible impact on us all.
The church’s attempt to regulate sexual behavior had a long history in Europe from a very early period. After Christianity became a state religion in the fourth century, the clergy recognized the power that sexual desire gave women over men, and persistently tried to exorcise it by identifying holiness with avoidance of women and sex, expelling women from any moment of the liturgy and from the administration of the sacraments, trying to usurp women’s life giving magical powers by adopting a feminine dress, and by making sexuality an object of shame. All these were the means by which a patriarchal caste tried to break the power of women and erotic attraction. (p. 36)
Even at the risk of over-simplifying a very complex issue, I can not help but to observe that part of the clergy’s playbook was to be at war with women’s life giving magical powers.
The clergy’s strategy is not unlike the way in which masses of people have been propagandized with the word, woke, a term that was indeed connected with the understanding of spiritual awakening. At the heart of the word, the caution to be deeply aware, to be alert to the rising weaponization all around each of us.
Hundreds of years ago, the masses did not have access to multiple streams of information that might have countered church dogma. And so, the clergy was successful in warping erotic power into a shameful thing and puppeteering human behavior.
To cement their acquired power, and restrict erotic power, the clergy milked all genders of prostitutes, offering protection from their sinful ways. It began with Pope Sixtus IV’s bordello tax, and continued beyond the corruption of Pope Alexander VI.
The coordination of taxation while delivering a most promising incentive within the church walls, absolution of sin, had a penetrating effect for everyone involved.
III. The Exploit: Mob Possession in Crypto
In The Apprentice, movie-goers see Roy Cohn’s world collide with a young Trump. Cohn is wild, hiding his sexuality, networked in the underworld of Mob power, and adept at the worst forms of manipulation. Undercut the other. Backroom deals. Extortion. Coercion. And blackmail. All forms of Hell on Earth that exploit both a person’s emotions and the communal dynamics they reside within — all what Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump.
In the first released Epstein list, Trump’s name appears multiple times. This is not a surprise for anyone who’s seen the photos of Epstein and Trump, buddied up across the globe. But what is surprising is that according to journalist Whitney Webb, part of the not yet released Epstein list not only allegedly contains names of Silicon Valley executives and American politicians, but also the evidence that Epstein’s deeper role was as a financial hitman, a currency manipulator with the task of collapsing currencies.
(46 seconds video)
Natalie Brunell YouTube Show | Full Episode with journalist Whitney Webb
In the last few weeks, an American judge has ruled that customers involved in the FTX fallout will be refunded. But they won’t be getting their crypto back. They’re getting cash.
I felt a slow, crawling pain travel across my body when I read the judge’s decision.
And as I see the rise of stablecoins, and other cryptocurrency dealings, I wonder about their fate and that of the hodlers.
IV. The Antidote: The Wisdom of Erotic Power
We are living in a time of reclamation. And when I sit with hundreds of women and non-binary identifying persons on a weekly Zoom call, and I hear Maggie Love say, “Be your own bank!” I feel part of that reclamation taking place.
It’s a ripe time to craft a world with more balanced powers, so long as we commit to reclaiming our erotic power.
What might it mean for true erotic power to have its place in our world again? Would crypto be better equipped to contend with the wily ways of old power?
Audre Lorde, an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet, and civil rights activist expands on the gifts erotic power offers each individual in her essay, The Uses of the Erotic. She writes:
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.
Although her essay features women, Lorde’s definition of erotic power is not restricted to women alone. It’s available to every human.
She then goes on to describe the erotic as an expansive, primordial force that activates us towards an internal requirement for excellence (not to be misconstrued for the impossible), adding:
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
Without the erotic, Lorde warns of systemic fate:
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment.
Her conclusion, that we live in an anti-erotic society currently enmeshed in superficially erotic power, is eerie. In this position, Lorde asserts that women in our world today are psychically milked for their magical powers to fuel old power.
The anti-erotic is the anti-feeling society, devolved from the feeling human into the automaton.
I sense that crypto is sliding into this fateful, inferior position too. But maybe there’s still time. Crypto is a really loud clarion call and a math-magical portal into our bodies, to embody ownership of our erotic power.
For me, a tweet from
and Leo Guinan nearly summarizes how I feel.
🔗 Link to the tweet.
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