How the Right can finally win American culture
Eight years after Andrew Brietbart’s death, his vision can finally happen
The judgments came fast and hard. “I want NAMES. Shame them,” tweeted comedienne Kathy Griffin. “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood,” added actress Alyssa Milano. A movie producer suggested the instantly infamous Covington, Kentucky teens be loaded hat first into a woodchipper. Scores of lesser knowns joined from America’s elite zip codes creating a days-long opprobrium cascade.
Just as the furor died new umbrage bloomed. In a “modern day lynching,” MAGA thugs had accosted a gay, black actor with racial slurs and a noose. Movie stars and media figures again lectured the masses and solemnly opined the incidents further showed President Trump’s election had unleashed an unyielding hate wave.
A year later, we know how it ended — unbridled hype, no bigotry, and pending lawsuits. What these two incidents and others through 2019 show is the left’s plenary grip on American culture. Like the laughably misreported ‘Russian Dossier,’ no one suffered professional consequences for maligning innocent teens or millions of Trump supporters. The worst offenders sally forth after deleted tweets or at most a so-not-sorry op-ed. Even botching major political stories yields shrugs. Rachel Maddow didn’t bother with an on-the-record comment when confronted with gross journalistic malpractice.
Cultural dominance not only excuses bad ethics and creates double standards; it limits what the right achieves politically in America and the rest of the world, as America’s cultural influence pervades every other country to some extent. The great Andrew Breitbart saw this. Politics is downstream from culture. But the tools needed to pursue his vision were embryonic when he died. Not anymore.
Conservatives will only lose fighting the political game
The left’s cultural dominance is peaking. Technological and legal changes will soon upend the dynamic. As cultural power equalizes drastic political changes will follow.
Fighting only political battles is a losing game. For a half decade the American right achieved stirring electoral victories, taking the presidency, both chambers of Congress, the Supreme Court and most statehouses. But the ballyhooed political surge resulted in few policy gains.
There were successes. A slew of federal judges including two Justices, minor regulatory roll back, tax relief, push-back on Title IX abuses, and a rebuke of foreign adventurism. As executives go, few if any of Trump’s 2016 rivals could have topped that and most would have done worse.
But except for the lifetime judges the rest won’t outlast the next Democratic president’s first 100 days. And Chief Justice John Roberts will ensure the Supreme Court remains lock-stepped with the zeitgeist.
The left dominates culture and thus makes the rules
In other ways, the right was clobbered over the past three years. It remains under constant threat of censorship from Silicon Valley’s tofu-eating potentates and progressive-feminist “safety councils.” Cultural influencers in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington, regularly attacked its values and habitually accused boosters of racism and bigotry. Wearing swag invited slurs, physical altercations, and constant threat of viral freak out by public-serving SJWs. And movement leaders were never free from restaurant banishment, home invasion, or campus “de-platforming.”
Leftist cultural pressure is pervasive, relentless, and often unseen. Activists pressure corporations through forced shareholder votes and threatened publicity campaigns. They organize in secret, member-only groups. Teenage activist sensations appear seemingly from nowhere complete with shadow media teams and ‘brand’ professionals shaping their public image. Stalwarts like Chick-fil-A cave.
Conservatives persevere, they defy, they persist, but except for meme culture, they always play defense. This is because the left ruthlessly controls every lever of American cultural power: media, entertainment, technology, k-college education, government bureaucracy, and the nonprofit sector. Overwhelmingly, the culture-industry gaggle views conservatives somewhere between mildly distasteful and “literally Hitler.” Until the right competes on cultural grounds, its political victories will be transient and temporary.
Culture works through economic principles
Cultural forces function like the economic principle of ‘concentrated benefits dispersed costs.’ Cultural influencers — from Hollywood directors to IRS bureaucrats — play to two different audiences. One is concentrated and geographically proximate — their colleagues and peers. This audience controls “benefits” in the social currency of prestige and solidarity. The other is the public, the consumers of their product. This audience is geographically dispersed and impotent to enforce real costs for what they deem hypocrisy, snobbery, or lax ethics.
The public imposes some costs by giving the media low trust rankings, not watching conservative-bashing award shows, increasingly questioning the value of a college degree, and of course complaining on Twitter. But these costs pale to the benefits of instant gratification, attention, and even envy of the culture-enforcer peer tribe.
This tribe narrows the range of acceptable views. It manifests in who gets invited on late-night shows, who gets called a cunt, which television shows get cancelled, what movies get made, which actors get cast, who speaks at college graduations, what nonprofits corporations and government support, who gets interviewed for federal civil-service jobs, whose speech is shadow banned, suspended, or demonetized, whose donor lists get leaked, who survives blackface scandals, and so on.
Kanye West is the exemplar. West is an icon who has sold 21 million albums and 100 million digital downloads. His wife is a, perhaps unfortunate, icon in her own right with almost 60 million Twitter followers. Yet even West admitted fearing backlash for supporting the president and said for a long time he lacked confidence to stand up to what he called liberal bullies. The backlash hardened as West’s support grew. His sanity is now regularly questioned; he was called a barely literate token negro on national television. What should have caused outrage barely registered.
Technology and law can rewrite the cultural rules
So long as the cultural left exacts so heavy a price on dissenters, the limits of what the political right can achieve will remain tiny.
But it’s all about to change. A technological revolution is afoot that will at least match the first two internet waves and could remove the left’s monopoly on cultural currency. Conservatives can begin fighting the culture wars on even ground — if they so choose. And it’s all because of blockchain.
The left dominates tech because disrupters tend to be leftists. And if by chance a Brendan Eich or James Damore appear, they get banished and shamed. The technology gap manifests in many ways. Mitt Romney’s data app “Orca” was a legendary fail. The cultures of Facebook, Google/YouTube, Apple, Twitter, and seemingly every Silicon Valley startup are leftist. Technology is first adopted, employed, and its boundaries defined in large urban areas. The collectivist mindset openly shares new ideas and explores applications in conferences where early rule-setting and relationship-forming happen. It is stunning left-leaning blockchain conferences have occurred since at least 2014, when no one knew the term.
Blockchain will reverse the flow of cultural information
Blockchain first emerged through Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper describing the public blockchain bitcoin. Blockchains are “distributed ledgers” that verify transactions through “trustless” crowdsourced systems. Ideally, they remove the need for trusted intermediaries between unfamiliar or even anonymous parties. In other words, blockchain shifts power from the concentrated to the disbursed.
When two parties transact over a blockchain they present a mathematical puzzle. Individual nodes in the blockchain network try to solve the puzzle, the one that does gets a reward like a fraction of bitcoin. The other nodes confirm the puzzle is solved and the transaction is recorded, which creates an immutable record. (There are other methods to validate transactions unimportant here). Blockchain’s easiest applications lie in financial transactions like sending money peer to peer. Its permanence has other intuitive uses like recording land deeds. Soon it could replace government functions like voting, paying taxes, or say recording evidence at a crime scene.
But its more interesting applications involve the flow of cultural currency now dominated by oligarchs in New York, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington. Just like banks, title companies, and the IRS, eventually third-party intermediaries that control social information like old media, Facebook, Google/YouTube, and Patreon will be unnecessary. A corollary will be the removal of the cultural left’s ability to enforce norms. This solves a huge problem for the right.
Cultural currency will rise from the ground up. The process started with the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s. Anyone could create a website, or a start blog. But only established institutional players like traditional media, well-known personalities, or ingenious entrepreneurs like Matt Drudge could monetize their work.
Oligarchs control the internet’s walled gardens, that will change
The second internet wave via social media created massive platforms and simplified the ability to grow followings. This beget YouTube stars and made unknowns Twitter famous. Some were able to profit but it lacked the true decentralization the third wave will bring. The real profit went to platform creators like Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page who recorded and analyzed personal data voluntarily given through “free” services, then sold it to the highest bidder.
Web 3.0 will level the field in several ways. First it will allow each person to own and monetize their personal data and followings. Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter derive power from collecting and dispensing information. Removing the monetary costs to use these platforms creates a porous internet “stack” that allows money and power to collect at the top.
As Brendan Eich described in a 2016 Ted Talk describing the next generation of web browsers: “Try to imagine a world where you own your dossier, it’s your online life, it should be your data, if you own it then you can give terms of service to the big network superpowers, the walled gardens, the giant companies that own too much of your data right now . . . that would be a good day.” Beyond browsers are decentralized applications or Dapps built to allow everyone to bypass these “walled gardens.” Users will control their cyber identities and carry their followings from blockchain to blockchain or Dapps built over blockchains.
Dapps are user driven, the crowd makes the rules
Competing blockchains or Dapps (pronounced DEE apps like email) will jockey to attract people, first influencers but everyone else too. Dapps are open source applications, fueled by digital currency with no centralized governance structure. Dapps will provide value for content and permission to send and receive information to an individual’s following. Once information is recorded on a blockchain it is permanent, it cannot be censored.
A Dapp could perhaps ban a person but it couldn’t also remove his following, only the followers could do that. And even the banning decision as with any other protocol change would be user-driven. Dapps with a reputation for censorship won’t last. Silicon Valley platforms acting as data chokepoints and determined to employ “safety councils” that censor or ban for political purposes will risk irrelevance.
While still in its infancy, early forms of this model are already thriving. Minds is a decentralized social-media platform that incorporates digital tokens and has recently integrated with the Ethereum blockchain. Blockstack is a nascent public blockchain currently inviting developers to build Dapps. This year it became the first crypto company qualified by the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell tokens to the public in a private sale.
Not only will blockchain eliminate social-media-giant hegemony but also traditional media. Dapps will disburse feeds of videos, live events, or anything else via preset rules and individual taste. As these platforms evolve and siphon audience from traditional and social-media oligarchs, established outlets will still play a role just as landlines do. They will act as credibility verifiers for official or ‘important’ events.
Smart contracts embedded in Dapps will change how people exchange information
Smart contracts embedded in Dapp code will govern data flow by allowing people to share and receive whatever information they want with whatever audience they want. Smart contracts are private cryptographic keys held by each party in an agreement to verify participation and assent to agreed terms. Embedded programmable code will allow individuals, applications, companies, or even different blockchains to form instant consortiums where they exchange digital currency for information and permission to share it with audiences according to preset rules. For instance if a post on a Dapp gets a certain number of views an automatic payment might initiate and a different application would then pick it up exposing the post to its audiences with which it had already negotiated terms and so on. These consortiums will be able to form and dissolve instantly and spread data without centralized barriers.
Blockchain will disrupt entertainment
Entertainment will be the next cultural gatekeeper to fall. Hollywood and the music industry are alliances of studios, talent, unions, ‘fixers,’ lawyers, and accountants who work in an opaque system designed to shield inner workings. Who becomes a star and who becomes a bitter waitress has some to do with talent and lots to do with who can satisfy the multitude of Harvey Weinstiens. How movies are distributed, what artists get airtime, and who profits is a world unto itself. Politics is also ever present. Aspiring conservative writers, actors, directors, and singers keep their politics to themselves or vent in undisclosed locations.
Production companies and individual entertainers will follow media into the token economy. Smart contracts can execute upon any designated trigger like a song download, eliminating the need for intermediaries. This will remove the guesswork from how entertainment happens from the talent, legal, and marketing side. Entertainment entrepreneurs that build up followings will be able to transfer and monetize it through market-based rules just like other influencers.
Transparency will reduce costs by a factor of five or six, just to start, and remove political considerations from what gets made, who gets cast, and who gets heard — or at least make those considerations straightforward. The entertainment company of the future will outsource most decisions to its built-in crowd, which will communicate with each other and management over a blockchain using native digital currency with embedded rights. If the crowd wants to cast a certain actress because of her politics (or any other reason) they’ll do so via some predetermined tokenized mechanism. Legion M, which has 16,000 investors and a 100,000-person community, is a precursor to this model.
Changes in the securities will speed cultural disruption
Recent changes in the securities laws will transform these industries even faster. Currently studios fund movie projects and reap profits on blockbusters. This is slowly changing with donation-model crowdfunding. Anyone can help fund entertainment projects as happened with the abortion saga ‘Gosnell’ and former feminist Cassie Jaye’s documentary ‘The Red Pill.’ But the JOBS Act of 2012, whose last title only went live in 2016, turns these donors into investors sharing in potential profits. This creates organic and free marketing operations for each project (movies and any other individual entertainment project can register as LLCs and participate). People interested in funding a potential movie or supporting a documentary will eventually buy security tokens and receive a digital-currency dividend every time a ticket is sold, or the product downloaded.
Further, tax incentives in places like Georgia, Louisiana, and New Mexico can remove production away from politically stifling Los Angeles. Thus complete alternatives to Hollywood and the music industry could arise in geographically distinct places run via rules-and-market based systems transparent at every level.
Conservatives can now fight the culture wars on even ground
What this all means is the cultural gatekeepers in New York, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington will be unable to regulate content. They will also lose the ability to dictate cultural norms because no centralized force controls blockchains. As alternatives arise, the best will break through niche audiences into the public. A true competition for American culture can begin.
This of course is speculative. No one can predict exactly what or how new technologies will affect our lives, societies, or governance. Creative destruction will rake the internet’s nascent third wave as it did the first two. Every technological revolution comes with tradeoffs; Web 3.0 will be no different.
Corporate and government capture constantly threaten decentralization ideals. No one predicted in the mid-1990s one company would dominate internet searches or online shopping. These companies along with the social-media oligarchs have huge adoption and resources. They won’t just cede the field. (Apple has apparently begun banning Dapps from its app store).
Privacy is another huge issue. As a panelist at one recent conference stated, “Blockchain is a surveillance wet dream.” Governments are nothing if not turf protectors. How much will they allow cryptography and privacy-focused digital currencies like Zcash and Monero to thrive? Will Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) oust private competition? How can technologists develop systems that allow for legitimate government functions without sacrificing the future to snooping bureaucrats or enabling the next Zuckerberg spy operation?
Conservatives can influence cultural rulemaking for the first time
Right now, people around the world are thinking about these issues. For once, the right can influence these discussions by attending conferences, developing policy at the government and nonprofit level, and starting companies for these markets. They should. This revolution is coming with or without them.
But what is undeniable is the information decentralization begun in the 1990s is now advancing breakneck. The battle for ideas so long stifled by cultural enforcers can flourish like never before in human history. It is a battle the right can finally win.
Paul H. Jossey is a lawyer focusing on equity crowdfunding and blockchain in Alexandria, Virginia. Please follow him on Twitter @paulhjossey
