This article is part of a series of adapted excerpts from “Bitcoin Is Venice” by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers, which is available for purchase in Bitcoin Magazine’s store now[1].
You can find the other articles in the series here[2].
“The concentration of the farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands — with the consequent increase of overhead, debt, and dependence on machines — is thus a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance. It forces a profound revolution in the farmer’s mind: once his investment in land and machines is large enough, he must forsake the values of husbandry and assume those of finance and technology.
“Thenceforth his thinking is not determined by agricultural responsibility, but by financial accountability and the capacity of his machines. Where his money comes from becomes less important to him than where it is going. He is caught up in the drift of energy and interest away from the land. Production begins to override maintenance. The economy of money has infiltrated and subverted the economies of nature, energy, and the human spirit. The man himself has become a consumptive machine.” — Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America”
The reader may understandably have been put off by our treatment so far in the past few sections of “the environment” as if a purely financial matter.[i] While we rather have little choice, given we are committed to discussing the relationship between stocks of capital — the environment, in this case, finance and communications infrastructure above — and capitalism, we do appreciate the inherent crassness of the approach, necessary or not.
The perception of crassness
