White Billionaire Crypto Bro Culture Needs to Die

Capitalism has done a lot of really terrible things. It (and a conflation of other sectors bent on denigration of the feminine) created an environment in which women were the legal property of the male people they married, so cut off from economic possibilities that they were simultaneously dependent on this system for basic survival. Slavery and capitalism in America went hand in hand.

It’s ravaged our planet. It’s tricked us into believing we have to look a specific way to be of value, then mined our insecurities about our physical appearances so that the richest and/or vainest pay to change them.

I think that all of these problems stem from an imbalance in yin and yang in humans of all genders, and therefore in the systems they (read: men, in almost all cases in recorded history to date) have created. The way we’re taught to alter our appearances is a direct result of some patriarchal “ideal,” a male gaze, steeped in misofem. Exploitative hierarchy is the product of toxic masculine energies, and is designed to protect the center.

It’s how monarchies work. It’s how white supremacy functions.

And it shows itself by degrees. Sometimes it seems harmless, or even “fun” or whatever (barf). Like when Twitter-happy white male billionaires with hair plugs/toupées who want indentured servitude on Mars promote joke cryptocurrencies on Ellen….and then a bunch of people with too much unhealthy masculine energy listen to them and buy it.

Peter Thiel, who wrote a book denouncing women’s suffrage & claiming that date rape didn’t exist, & Elon Musk, pre-hair plugs.

I knew the founder of DOGE, Jackson Palmer, a little bit. Seeds went through Boost VC, a Bitcoin-focused startup accelerator, in 2014. Palmer had co-created DOGE with Billy Markus at the end of the previous year, and was asked to mentor startups in the Boost program.

We only hung out a few times. He was great, and I found his partner, Grace, an anarchist, radical feminist, fascinating. At least, I recall her having anarchist tendencies…but maybe I’m projecting the urge I still sometimes feel myself to burn it all to the ground.

I remember Palmer being pretty horrified by what had happened with DOGE even then, in its infancy. Later, as cited in a New York Times piece, he said the cryptocurrency market “increasingly feels like a bunch of white libertarian bros sitting around hoping to get rich and coming up with half-baked, buzzword-filled business ideas.”

Which makes the fact that DOGE has become the banner crypto for that demographic - led by Musk - all the stranger.

DOGE was meant to be silly and fun, and the community did some great philanthropic things back in the day. They paid to send the Jamaican Bobsled Team to the Olympics in 2014 when the athletes couldn’t otherwise afford it.

That spirit - of using cryptocurrency to help others - is aligned with our intentions at Seeds.

But the cool elements of the community’s early days have gotten co-opted by the kind of arrogant dumb guys who talk at me every time I make a general crypto video on TikTok, behaving like they know stuff, mansplaining, professing undying devotion to Joe Rogan. (The Venn Diagram of people who like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk seems to be a circle.)

And sometimes, they threaten to kill me. The worst internet hate I have ever received was from Elon Musk fans (I refused to say ‘stans’ because it glamorizes a fictional character who murdered his pregnant female partner, making the term misogynistic as fuck) when I made what was intended to be a helpful TikTok about DOGE. The death threat came from someone with an avi showing a white male torso, shirtless.

That image, and that violence, has come to represent the sort of energy I continually experience when forced to engage with that community today.

Maybe the worst part is then being confronted with the part of me that believes that I deserve this. As I write, I’m assuming that simply because I’m sharing a negative experience that I was subjected to, I’m vulnerable to further attack.

This is what misofem baked into the old system has taught me: that a person can work for many years to try and help out other people, overcoming overwhelming odds to keep a project going…but because that person is in the feminine, receiving viciousness is to be taken for granted, assumed. There’s a time in the future at which I will have done enough Vipassana to release this belief, this habit-pattern from my body, but it’s as yet unhealed today.

**

I know that Rogan, the dumb guy’s smart guy, has hundreds of millions of listeners, that Musk has tens of millions of Twitter followers who don’t care that he is abusive to women, that he is generally and deeply uncool.

So when Mark Cuban calls DOGE “better than a lottery ticket” on Ellen, evidently many in this demographic aren’t savvy enough to immediately see what a hilariously stupid statement that is.

All I want is for them is to leave me alone, so that I can do this work through Seeds to get us out of that. I still have to live out this human existence on Earth, in the midst of all of this energetic sludge, but I’ve managed to carve out a life in which I rarely have to interact with that bad masculine energy anymore, after being immersed in it for years growing up in a family with a narcissistic father, an enabling mother, and a Golden Child brother, while at Duke (a terrible place for the feminine), while working as a stock trader, and during the period at which I was engaging every day with male people in the world of tech.

I am very glad that since then, I’ve been able to create a bit of a sanctuary through Seeds. If you need a crypto safe space too, that’s what Seeds is meant to be.

You can come feel a little bit better over here, while we continue to work together to build a kinder, more feminine (and thereby more balanced) economic system that I believe will inevitably transcend the old.

And we can watch from this vantage point, safely, as that worse way crumbles.

Here’s to a system that truly nourishes us, rather than trying to destroy us. 💗

-Rachel