Crypto Bros & Gen Z TikTok Socialists are Two Sides of the Same Movement

tl;dr

“A completely unregulated system would only serve to exacerbate the problem (as the FTX meltdown has more or less exemplified with comic precision), and a socialist system would probably ensure there’s not much wealth to fight over (as the Bros are quick to point out by referencing Venezuela). Neither group’s solution addresses the heart of the problem without introducing a host of new ones.”

When I envision the political spectrum online, somewhere along the far right—the alt-right, more accurately—is the stereotypical crypto bro. 

You know the kind. They’re typically white, male, and somewhere between 21 and 40 years old. Basically, the Winklevii. They have laser eyes, hexagonal NFT Twitter profile photos, and a bizarre, vaguely homoerotic way of interacting with one another on the internet (apes together strong!). 

On the other side of the political spectrum, I envision what I can only refer to as the far-left Gen Z TikTok socialist. The person who’s still campaigning earnestly for Bernie Sanders, believes capitalism is the root of all evil, and probably owns a lot of secondhand Birkenstocks. Suffice it to say, dismantling the system and eating the rich is very much in vogue.

(I’m intentionally painting very stereotypical caricatures here: the way someone on the far left might describe a crypto bro, and vice versa.)

What’s important to note about how I conceptualized these typecast characters in the past is that I saw them as political opposites. People who believe very, very different things.

But the more I reflected on the sentiment of their core messages, the more I started to wonder: Is the political spectrum actually a loop?

General distrust of the powers that be

When I tossed this observation into my beloved Twitter cesspool, someone noted that there’s a name for something akin to this phenomenon: horseshoe theory. 

Horseshoe theory postulates that extreme political views on either end of the spectrum actually closely resemble one another. Though, when I did some quick Googling, the first few articles had headlines like, “Let’s Put an End to Horseshoe Theory Once and For All,” and “Horseshoe Theory is Nonsense!” And considering some of the human rights issues up for grabs in political ideologies more generally, it stands to reason that horseshoe theory could be seen as insensitive at best and heartless at worst.

But in the financial realm, I can’t unsee the similarities between what these two groups (the crypto bro niche, henceforth referred to as the “Bros” and Gen Z anti-capitalist culture, henceforth referred to as “the Birks”) believe is wrong with America.

The Bros’ lack of trust in the “establishment”

In the cryptosphere, there’s a deep distrust of “fiat currency.” Technically speaking, “fiat” means a floating currency backed by a sovereign state (aka the good ol’ US of A) rather than a commodity, like gold. 

What gives fiat value? Well, at its core, the fact that you have to pay your taxes with it. 

Every citizen has to pay taxes (assuming they earn enough to do so) using USD. You can’t send the IRS a Dogecoin. As a result, taxation is what creates an inherent demand for fiat currency and gives it value within the ~societal construct~ we live in. What happens if you don’t pay your taxes? You get thrown in prison! Fun. The stakes are high.

If fiat currency gives a sovereign state’s government more control over its citizens, what’s the Bros’ solution? A completely decentralized, unregulated asset class/currency/bitstonk, or whatever we’re calling it this week.

This scans to me as less germane to nerdy technicalities of digital payment systems and more an overarching suspicion of—a lack of confidence in—the government’s competence and intentions with respect to monetary policy decisions (and, by extension, the economic conditions it created and continues to perpetuate). 

Hell, the system they’re advocating for is literally called trustless.

While I fear I’ll need to cite Discord channels as primary source material here, I feel confident after interacting with enough Bros to assert: Generally speaking, they don’t trust the federal government (and they think the Federal Reserve is ruining the country). 

One such retort to a video I posted about wage stagnation and taxing the rich: “So your solution is to give more money to the government? The government’s just full of rich people—that’s not going to fix anything.”

And behold, a perfect segue to the eerily similar far-left, anti-capitalist complaint:

The Birks: Those in the ruling class are rich, powerful, and deeply entangled with private industry

The Guardian reported in 2021 that 67% of millennial and Gen Z Brits say they’d prefer to live in a socialist economic system. Nowhere in the zeitgeist is this rejection of capitalism more apparent than on TikTok. Gawker captured it perfectly in this piece, where Clare Coffey writes:

“Capitalism, in this rhetorical strain, is not so much the object of analysis or a concrete historical phenomenon as an all-purpose gesture. ‘Capitalism’ is useful everywhere: as the punchline of self-deprecating jokes about the way we live now, as a perennial-but-distant bogeyman that explains chronic frustrations without ever causing enough pain to force serious disruption.” 

It is, in essence, the classic retort, “Because capitalism.” 

And what’s the colloquially accepted opposite of capitalism? Socialism.

Perhaps nobody distrusts the establishment (Republicans and Democrats alike!) as much as the Bros, but if anyone comes close, it’s the socialist Birks.

They point to information like rampant wealth inequality (and the fact that many of the mega-rich are in positions of major decision-making power) and say, “The system is rigged and government officials aren’t incentivized to tax the rich because they’re all super-fucking-rich.” The greed, corporate lobbying, and 1%ers in charge? It’s not exactly giving “for the people, by the people,” and the general result is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. 

Hell, even I have posted screenshots of this Wikipedia page that conspicuously documents the net worths (and suspiciously low salaries) of the richest “civil servants”—clocking in at #1 is Republican Rick Scott at $259,700,000, followed closely by Democrat Mark Warner with $214,100,000. The richest 50 members of Congress (so, about 10%) each have 8- or 9-figure net worths.

And while I don’t consider myself an anti-capitalist, the fact that 10% of our country controls around 70% of its total wealth tends to (justifiably!) raise eyebrows about how effectively our system is currently distributing the #goods that the vast majority of us are working to produce.

The anti-capitalist solution? A complete economic overhaul: socialism.

Socialism, at its core, is the rejection of private ownership. Generally speaking, the state (read: government) owns the means of production and distribution, and in Marxist theory, socialism is described as the transitional stage between capitalism and Communism. 

This often emerges in response to the (rather dystopian) public services landscape in the US, which lacks things like universal healthcare, subsidized higher education, and any meaningful solution for childcare. (Though, believe it or not, the majority of places on Earth that provide these things are not socialist countries. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all have strong, free market capitalist systems that just happen to have better social safety nets and public services—hence my constant pontificating that we in the US could learn a thing or two from them.)

The point is, the Bros and Birks share very similar grievances

While there’s an air of conspiratorial paranoia found in both ideologies, they are—at their core—reacting to the same legitimate issues.

Wage stagnation is a problem. Wealth inequality has significantly worsened. Upward mobility is far less achievable than we once thought, perhaps thanks in part to tech oligarchs and other megalomaniacal titans of industry. (Sadly, one such megalomaniac is the unofficial patron saint of the crypto movement, which elevates this entire thing to a level of Shakespearean paradox.)

So while it’s easy to write off either group as extreme (and maybe even insufferable, at their fringes), they’re really just (very specific) manifestations of the same complaints levied during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 by the “99%.”  

They’re both disillusioned by the status quo, and in some ways, I think both groups feel they’ve been fundamentally lied to about the way in which their lives were going to unfold. 

Importantly, they both reject “the way things are” as broken. 

Unfortunately, they arrive at vastly different solutions, because ultimately, they’re identifying different core causes

The two paths diverge when we have to determine what the hell we do about it. 

The crypto bros are often libertarians, because their end goal is having basically no government at all. “Code is law,” or something.

Moreover, they embrace wealth accumulation—they have no issue with being rich, they just feel there’s now only one viable means of achieving it. Web3! While they acknowledge they’ve been left off the first “rocketship” (you know, the fiat one), the general consensus is that crypto is the chance to catch the second one. (Maybe that’s where the Elon fascination comes from?) And if you’re not on board, you can “have fun staying poor.”

On the flip side, socialism would suggest a unilaterally strong public sector, because…everything would be the public sector. In pure socialism, there’s no private sector (because there’s no private ownership), which means everything is government.

It’s interesting that the Birks and the Bros arrive at such opposite conclusions, given their shared premise: Our problems flow from the corruption, disproportionate riches, and—maybe—incompetence at the metaphoric “top.”

For the Birks, capitalism (and all it signifies) as a broad and nebulous system is to blame for the private-ownership-gone-awry issues, so total rejection is the solution

The Gen Z TikTok socialists at least claim to reject material wealth and its spoils (though I find this dubious, as critics point out they often use new iPhones to film the videos in which they’re sipping Starbucks or using something they bought from Amazon). In spirit, though, it can be a very “van life-y” sentiment—that you don’t need things or material goods (read: wealth) to be happy, and that accumulating money is a shitty way to spend your life (and maybe even a little immoral).

That, sure, the government as it exists today within the context of our private ownership economy may be a runaway hot mess express, but if we just ditch private enterprise altogether and institute universal basic income, that should mostly fix the issue. 

For the Bros, the vague concept of “centralization” is the issue, so “taking the power back” is akin to accumulating wealth in another way

Perhaps nobody embodies this ideology more than the now-fallen-from-grace Scam Bankrun-Fraud.

Sam’s solution for a fucked-up world? Become a privately wealthy crypto trillionaire and then give all the money away (it’s still up in the air whether effective altruism was a genuinely held belief that led him to “borrow” $10 billion from his investors or if it was a clever branding ploy all along). 

Regardless, it’s capitalism reimagined in 0s and 1s—positing that new “good actors” who become independently ultra-wealthy can fix the issues that our existing ultra-wealthy individuals…can’t?

What if there were a better way?

Mike Green, a macro wealth management guy, captured this strange overlap perfectly when he expressed his frustration at being attacked constantly by the bitcoin crowd in an interview (edits my own for clarity and brevity):

“I’ve recently come out against bitcoin in terms of the impact that I think it’s ultimately having on a variety of fronts. The anger and nastiness that gets thrown at me from people who simultaneously call me a capitalist pig and a member of the 1% and representing the status quo and from another group of people who are screaming that I’m a socialist and that I’m a communist and trying to…(trails off) It’s just coming from all directions.”

How else do we arrive at this place where a hedge fund big shot is lambasted as both a capitalist 1% pig and a socialist? Unless there’s a great deal of confusion and overlap between these two movements? How else do we get here, considering these two schools of thought appear to be embittered about the same things?

I’d argue the vast majority of complaints that the Bros and the Birks agree on are a consequence of the same real issue that we mostly ignore in the lofty moral and mythical discussions of socialism and Bitcoin: rampant corporate and financial deregulation beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Deregulation (and all its related practices)

The problems that both groups point to as emblematic of our downfall—the riches of those at the very top, corruption, and to some extent, the expansionary monetary policy that’s mostly served as a reaction to clusterfuck economic black swans like the Global Financial Crisis—can all be directly or indirectly traced to 40 years of heavy-handed deregulation that made it easier to do everything from large-scale gambling with risky financial instruments (which contributed to the housing crisis and generally has the effect of privatizing gains but socializing losses) to manipulating stock buybacks to drive glutted executive pay (which comprises a large part of the hundreds of millions that CEOs in the US earn each year).

A completely unregulated system would only serve to exacerbate the problem (as the FTX meltdown has more or less exemplified with comic precision), and a socialist system would probably ensure there’s not much wealth to fight over (as the Bros are quick to point out by referencing Venezuela). Neither group’s solution addresses the heart of the problem without introducing a host of new ones. 

It would be too easy (and let’s be honest, predictable) for me to go on a Scandinavian power trip and suggest we merely adopt some of the balanced “cuddly capitalist” principles, beef up the corporate and financial regulations, and move on—after all, the US is ideologically a very, very different place than, say, Denmark.

But I think these two seemingly contradictory corners of the internet—encapsulating both the Elon bootlickers with rocketship emojis in their profiles and anti-capitalist girlies with #EatTheRich in their bios—have more in common than they think.

Now, if only we could get them to join forces and reignite the “We are the 99%” spark to fight for regulation, close tax code loopholes, overturn Citizens United, and address some of the other root policy issues at play…so close, and yet so far.