The Los Angeles Bitcoin Mint: Returning Public Discourse to The Town Square
Creating a place to share art, ideas, and money outside of the machine state.
Censorship didn't kill public discourse. Surveillance did.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he claimed he was on a mission to save the digital town square. He and the rising anti-woke counterculture at the time thought that the censorship of Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, and the Babylon Bee represented an existential threat to free discourse.
But, the debate on free speech and censorship in the digital world was — and is — a red herring. It distracts from Twitter's and all digital media platforms' strategic efforts to lay claim to your speech, thoughts, and behavior—whether you think it's free or not.
Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, explains this strategy in chilling detail. As a social media company, Twitter's goal, contrary to what Elon thought, is not to own the narrative by censoring and promoting content along ideological lines. Their business strategy is simple: to predict and claim credit for user behavior.
Zuboff states that these claims to your future self are bought and sold to a wide variety of bidders in secondary markets. They aren't simply going to some social media manager with access to the company's marketing budget. They make their way to intelligence agencies, data analytics companies and political operatives, all with sophisticated networks and mechanisms of social influence.
Social engineering tools, therefore, don't lie at the top of the surveillance pyramid. To be effective, they must first be hidden in plain sight and, second, operate in a controlled and predictable environment.
So, the only consistent bias these profit-driven digital media platforms have is against unpredictability. They train their algorithms to study your most compulsive habits and deepest desires and suppress anything prone to break those habits or your worldview.
For example, they systematically suppress posts from people who tend to change their perspectives or interests. You hear this echoed from social media coaching accounts. The number one recommendation they give is consistency, consistency, consistency. They claim that the algorithm rewards predictable behavior and engagement over quality content and punishes accounts that exhibit unpredictability. This inclination to suppress accounts that fail to stick to their lane makes sense when you consider they make money off their predictions. It's not your user experience they care about. It's the user experience of social engineering specialists.
As a consequence, these platforms also infect us with the same bias against the unpredictability of the material world. This effect manifests as anxiety in new and uncontrolled situations and as boredom with people and conversations outside of our narrowing interests niche.
This dynamic explains the steady and unprecedented rise in anxiety, particularly in young people. For example, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found a 12% increase in major anxiety and depressive episodes in young girls and a 4% increase in boys from 2010 to 2024. What's telling about this data is that this trend all started around the same time social media and smartphones became widely available.
When you pair this data with Zuboff's work, you see that simple addiction and overuse of technology aren’t the primary culprits behind these trends. It is the persistent and gradual invasion of social platforms and social engineering specialists into our decision-making faculties that explains this crisis. And it’s why reality increasingly feels fake and why simulation theory is in vogue. It touches every interaction we make in ways we aren't consciously aware of.
This class of engineers is leading us down a truly dark path. Because, while simultaneously increasing our distrust and interest in material reality, they are now eroding digital trust by unlocking a floodgate to a deluge of digital deepfakes. Our shared objective reality is rapidly disappearing. And if we don’t wake up to this phenomenon, we will be tempted to give all rights and agency to a digital philosopher king who can set things right in both worlds.
The Los Angeles Bitcoin Mint: A way out
Unlike Musk, I couldn't care less about the digital town square. The real question is, how can we restore the original one? How can we create a common space where we can freely share art, debate ideas, and inspire one another? And how do we do it in a way that leaves a lasting impact on both worlds—without the exposure to social engineering tools and tactics?
Unfortunately, our IRL experiences only carry weight in both the physical and digital when we ask the data harvesting platforms to host a live feed of the events. That tether leaves a more meaningful impact because it provides digital legitimacy and the promise to reach more people.
But it also asks something from us in return. It asks us to act in accordance with an online identity so that whatever we do and post tells a consistent narrative. This consistency gives the platform claim over our behavior in return for full access to its reach.
The Los Angeles Bitcoin Mint is an artist collective that takes that implicit contract and spins it on its head. Instead of inviting digital platforms to host and broadcast live events, it plants a permanent invitation in Bitcoin, the bedrock of digital consensus, to come and experience the event untethered to your online identity.
That invitation is a Bitcoin Ordinals collection of physical Bitcoin receipts and zines, cataloged under an IRL event inscription on the Bitcoin blockchain. Each zine documents art and ideas shared during recurring public forums. And the physical bitcoin receipts mark transactions that permanently mint bitcoin into tangible art or money. We achieve this through The Bitcoin Mint, a teleburning protocol that converts unique natural patterns (such as wood grain) into receive-only bitcoin addresses. Our approach is detailed further in "The Anarchist's Guide to Cashing Out of The Matrix."
By archiving these forums and art on Bitcoin's immutable ledger, our work becomes a lasting, physical artifact with a permanent digital invitation to experience and authenticate it in person.
This paradigm replaces the hope of digital reach with the promise of digital permanence, bridging the physical and digital worlds in a way that leaves a meaningful impact on both. Unlike social media platforms, the Bitcoin Blockchain doesn't demand consistency between your online identity and your physical one. It is the ultimate icon of pseudonymity. And while there is a clear and present attempt to leverage its transparency to enforce a new social engineering apparatus, these invitations don't require your identity or public transaction to reveal it inadvertently.
They quietly invite individuals from the digital world to explore, participate, or even host their own public forums for inclusion (contact us if interested!).
We take the view from Peter Kropotkin's paper on Mutual Aid that every human is part of a social species that, when stripped of all artificial means of intermediation, is predisposed with a natural inclination to trust and cooperate with all members of the same species. We hope that this bridge re-habituates us toward this type of mutual exchange.
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Explore our latest event collection on Magic Eden or via any Bitcoin Ordinals explorer. Our first event and zine issue are already on-chain, and our next meetup is scheduled for July 9, 2023. Register here.
Learn more and mint your own physical bitcoin at The Bitcoin Mint.