Speeding Doomsday
April 05, 2025
Adoption of the internet followed Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations curve, progressing through distinct stages: it began with innovators (like universities and the military during the ARPANET era), gained momentum with early adopters in the 1990s, and reached mass adoption in the 2000s, becoming global infrastructure. This expansion was accelerated by network effects (Metcalfe's Law), where its value grew exponentially with each new user, and by actor-network theory (Bruno Latour), which highlights how protocols like TCP/IP and interactions between human and non-human actors shaped its evolution. However, as Gartner’s hype cycle shows, the internet also faced crises, such as the dot-com bubble, before consolidating as an indispensable technology.
Bitcoin much like the internet, follows a similar adoption pattern but at an earlier stage. Its innovators were cypherpunks and cryptography enthusiasts (2009-2012), followed by early adopters, such as investors and blockchain startups (2013-2017). Now, it is approaching the early majority phase, with corporations and governments exploring regulation, though it still faces volatility and scalability challenges. Like the internet, Bitcoin benefits from network effects,the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes,and aligns with Schumpeter’s theory of technological change, which predicts its potential to disrupt traditional finance. However, unlike the internet, which has moved past its "trough of disillusionment," Bitcoin still swings between peaks of hype and crises of confidence, reflecting the more complex nature of its adoption as both a decentralized asset and protocol.
Behind the seemingly immaterial nature of the internet and cryptocurrencies, however, lies a growing environmental cost, driven by neoliberal capitalism. As theories like the Capitalocene (Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway) and political ecology (Joan Martinez-Alier) demonstrate, digital infrastructure,from data centers to Bitcoin mining,consumes staggering amounts of energy and natural resources, often extracted through exploitative practices in the Global South. Jevons’ paradox reveals that even with improvements in energy efficiency, consumption only increases, as seen with streaming and IoT. Meanwhile, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of acceleration shows how the logic of digital capitalism fuels ever-shorter cycles of production and waste, deepening the climate crisis. While the internet and Bitcoin represent revolutionary innovations, their unregulated expansion under the logic of infinite growth also makes them engines of environmental destruction,unless a radical break from the current model occurs.
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