Lessons From an Old Hippie : Why I Don't Vote and the Promise of Crypto

photo by https://unsplash.com/@smokenetwork

I don't vote.

My best friend in high school had neo-hippie parents and one day we were out picking Hostas from a local Jerry Garcia lookalike when he tilted his rose-colored glasses up at us and said, "Don't vote kid, it only encourages them."

At the time I probably giggled uncomfortably at this old hippie dude in his garden dishing out political nuggets to an 18-year-old during the fading twilight of the Clinton 90s. After all, we were brought up to think that voting meant something and that we were all supposed to have a voice. That we all got people in power that we deserved because of, well, "democracy."

I didn't know better at the time, but as I got older I started to sour at politics, especially mainstream Party politics. I remember being struck by the character in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington in my 11th grade Government class. I hardly remember the movie these days, but I remember the message.

"Try to change things and you'll be stonewalled at every turn, and selling out is the only answer."

It always seemed like the Two-Party system was just two sides of the same coin. No matter who was in power there would be wars, tons of foreign meddling, and pork barrel spending. None of these guys were ever really on the side of the little guy, the man in the street just trying to raise his family.

Politics has a bit of a WWE and Tent Revival vibe, like Bob Tilton circa 1990 meeting Stone Cold Steve Austin and Vince McMahon. It feels fake and slick and smarmy. People are itching for entertainment on the one hand and savior on the other.

I'm a disinterested and disheartened observer, like somebody out of an Edward Hopper painting.

Edward Hopper. (2023, October 10). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hopper

On the outside looking in.

I don't engage in the circus. I gave up WWE after the Attitude Era and I only ever watched Bob Tilton for the laughs his over-the-top preaching gave me.

screenshot of charlatan televangelist Bob Tilton

Nothing but war, war, and more war.

My youth was at the tail end of the Cold War.

Then it was Desert Storm.

Then Somalia.

Bosnia and Yugoslavia.

Bushes "Shock and Awe" era of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Obama-era Libya debacle.

Syria under Trump

Yemen

Now it's saber rattling against Russia and China.

I can't stand any of it. It doesn't matter who is in power, it's always the same. They drum up a reason to kill somebody somewhere with our taxpayer money.

Red/Blue are two sides of the same rotten coin, a false dialectic that never ends unless we step out of the matrix and stop playing their games. We vote with our feet.

Endless wars and rumors of wars.

Wolves in sheep's clothing.

Empty suits for the military-industrial complex.

The promise of the matrix

The rise of the cryptocurrency space and the early censorship-free internet was a source of solace as I completely stepped away from any form of participation or engagement with mainstream politics.

If we couldn't be free from tyranny and incompetence in the real world then maybe we could be free in cyberspace, the final frontier. Like something out of Neuromancer maybe the Matrix was our future.

Maybe we could work out forms of engagement and styles of life where we could live in a parallel society of our own, utilizing cryptography and pseudo-anonymity alongside a barter system and BTC to do business.

Like the refugees from the city of tyranny escaping the mechanical hound in Fahrenheit 451, we could build parallel societies on the margins, and like Christ be "of the world but not in it."

The early internet was free of censorship. The final frontier. Freedom at last. Crypto used to feel like that, and it still has pockets of it.

Of course, this isn't how things ended up, and it will be an uphill battle to fight off the regulators and CBDCs that are inevitably rolling down the tracks, but what else can an old crypto bro do?

I dropped out of politics years ago. I refuse to play their games. My only activism is trying to teach people about crypto and to be as helpful as possible to those in my immediate circle, wherever I find myself.

At heart I'm more of an anarchist/agorist I guess.

And no, I still don't vote. What you do is your choice, but I've made mine.