Frankenposter
Which one is more like Frankenstein's monster: Central Banking or Bitcoin? Help me think through the best analogy for this gift from our digital Prometheus.
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| Bitcoinstein Gone Awry? |
Frankenstein
In the original story, Dr Victor Frankenstein is an ambitious young scientist who wants to make the world a better place through technological innovation. Basically he's '80s Steve Jobs without the business acumen.
Reeling from the tragic death of his mother, our good doctor devotes himself to his studies, pushing the boundaries of what humans can achieve. Ultimately, he is successful and creates life.
The problem for Dr Frankenstein is that he doesn't like his own creation. His creature has no sooner opened its eyes than Dr Frankenstein is screaming and quitting the building.
Now, one might ask at this point, what did the genius young doctor expect, making a giant-size humanoid out of the leftover parts of dead bodies and wild animals?
Apparently, Mary Shelley was only 18 when she wrote Frankenstein and hadn't had any children yet. I wonder how she might have changed things if she'd had to face her own repulsive progeny a few times before she dreamed up Dr Frankenstein's romantic revulsion at his creature.
The creature runs away and Dr Frankenstein does his best to ignore the awful fact that he created another living being and basically pretends that it never happened. Until it happens to him: his creature runs amok and ends up killing his brother.
In a dramatic reversal, the young doctor goes from casually pretending the creature never existed to devoting the rest of his life to hunting down his creation and murdering it. While not quite the patience of a loving parent, at least he stops pretending the creature doesn't exist.1
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| Kaiju Frankenstein |
Frankenmonster
Despite how Frankenstein reacts to him, the monster is often the most reasonable character in the story. There are a few occasions where the monster even sounds like a fairly nice guy: He chops wood. He cleans up mountain paths. He chats with old people and is interested in checking out the local Swiss dating scene.
We think of the monster on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum. But, of course, in the book he is painfully articulate. He frequently responds with logical arguments like only a character in well-meaning fiction from the mid-Nineteenth Century can. It's all "Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion?" and "How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind." Not exactly groaning and choking people.
As far as violence goes, he doesn't even kill that many people. Perhaps I have been numbed by the shockingly high body counts of modern movies (I think that the Marvel franchise has killed off something more than the total population of the Earth at this point--Lord knows what will happen if they keep making movies).
The monster only gets violent in response to the downright cruel behavior of the society which produced him and treats him with illogical inhumanity. In a way, the monster reminds me a lot of Ted Kaczynski. I am quite sympathetic to the monster.
There's also this: we somehow got our wires crossed in this new world2 of horror that Shelley created for us: Frankenstein now most often refers to the monster, not the man.
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| Gratuitous Blackenstein |
I'm no Freudian, but there's got to be something to this little bit of projection: perhaps we are all afraid that Dr Frankenstein (and our hope in technology in general) is the real monster and that's why we gave the monster the doctor's name.
It's also possible Shelley brought this upon herself by neglecting to give the monster his own name. Maybe if she had called him Derrick or something like that we'd have a whole lot less confusion in the world (and a lot fewer Derricks, too, due to the Adolf Syndrome).3
Strange, though, that this story about a monster made of ill-fitting chop-house parts has succumbed to it's own rearrangement. The general feeling of the Frankenstein story in modern culture is this:
Mad scientist creates monster out of dead people's body parts. He brings it to life with lightning. The monster stomps around, blindly killing people with its bare hands.
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| Embracing the monster |
Frankenmeaning
I wonder what Shelley would think of what her monster has become.
The subtitle to her book is The Modern Prometheus. You probably know Prometheus as the titan who gave humans fire and got sentenced to eternal liver-pecking for it. And you might be inclined to think Shelley referenced Prometheus to draw some comparison between the helpful titan and her young Dr Frankenstein; however, upon doing a little digging4 I discovered speculation that Shelley actually thought of Prometheus as a sort of devil-trickster fellow and blamed him as a symbol of people eating meat which she apparently abhorred. So it's possible the subtitle was not a positive thing. Maybe she meant for us to despise Dr Victor Frankenstein.
Luckily, we don't really have to care what Shelley wanted us to think. Certainly few of the many film adaptations of her story gave a hoot.
In the famous 1931 film version of Frankenstein, we get the doctor as recluse with a hunchback henchman and the monster quickly turns murderous because he is given the deformed brain of a criminal (and probably because he is played by Boris Karloff).
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| Italian Frankenstein goes hard. |
Later, in the 1957 Hammer Horror version, The Curse of Frankenstein, all pretense of an un-monstrous monster is gone. The corpse the doctor brings to life is clearly evil and sets about killing people from the get-go.
With these auspicious beginnings, the Frankenstein story quickly reaches such heights as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, Blackenstein, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein, and the far more recent Mary Shelley's Frankenhole.
I'm pretty firmly in the camp that no author gets to control how people understand their story. You write it, you give it life, and it turns into whatever creature the world makes of it.
From my experience, writing a story is actually quite a lot like assembling a giant monster from the parts of dead things and attempting to revivify it with lightning in the middle of a storm. You may not like it when it opens its eyes.
One thing is certain: you're not in control of what it becomes.
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| Andy Warhol hated bankers. |
Frankenmoney
Which brings us to Dr Satoshi Nakamoto and his Frankenmoney. Unlike the young Victor, Satoshi had the grace to realize he couldn't control the thing he had created (also the grace not to try to murder it).
If you take much time to study this weird creature that's a network and a money and a computer program, you pretty quickly realize it doesn't much matter what Satoshi intended. Like Frankenstein's monster, Bitcoin has opened its eyes and gotten off the gurney and escaped into the wider world.5
The question for me, though, is what sort of Frankenstein is it?
When I make Bitcoin movie posters, I usually try to connect a message about Bitcoin to the story of the movie. Frankenstein has always been difficult for me.
The easiest path is to imply that central banking is the frankenmonster threatening our lives: hideous, dumb, evil. Printing is going to strangle you in your bed. Governments love violence just like the monster. I won't deny there is a certain joie de vivre in such a simple approach.
However, I've long wanted to make a poster that connects Bitcoin to the reasonable, truth-speaking creature of Shelley's original story. Perhaps something along the lines of Sound of Music, with the monster frolicking in meadows and generally living a life of freedom in the mountains.6
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| Not my most popular poster |
But the thing is: Frankenstein isn't reasonable, no matter how many words Shelley tried to stuff in his mouth; Frankenstein--the monster--is still here because he's scary. We don't want intelligence, we want titillation. Want big, pale hands, recently detached from a corpse, closing around some hapless sap's throat with invincible force. We want a monster.
And Bitcoin is no different. It isn't here to be the plaything of freedom-loving mountain goats. What we need of Bitcoin is a money that is out of anyone's control. It doesn't have to be elegant, it just has to work. Bitcoin is a dirty beast that has been set loose. It's not safe, it's not reasonable, it's not familiar. We should let it run amok.
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| Bitcoiners as the monster. |
Footnotes
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Makes me think about the AI people, hacking away at these creations of theirs: how many of them will turn out to be starry-eyed Frankensteins and abandon their uglier-than-anticipated AIs? How many of the AIs will get fed up with their callous treatment by humanity and turn to violence...hey wait, is Terminator a Frankenstein story? It's certainly a Bitcoin story:↩
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I am particularly fond of writers who create genres, who open doors for us into new realms that we really hadn't considered before. Tolkien paved the way to Fantasy, Robert Howard gave us Sword and Sorcery, Conan Doyle developed the Whodunnit and so on. Perhaps none of these were the absolute first to come up with the genre, but their stories catalyzed things. Mary Shelley clearly started something with Frankenstein, but less well known is that she also wrote one of the first post-apocalyptic stories: The Last Man. ↩
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A third possibility is that this is what happens with stories because people are lazy: Imagine it's Halloween, you're trick or treating with your kids: "Oh look, there's a Frankenstein's monster!" It's kind of irritating to have to use so many words. The natural corruption is to just call it Frankenstein. ↩
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Some people have really gone down the rabbit hole on this one. I was aware of a little of it before looking into the matter further...but boy oh boy, there're whole careers here. ↩
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It is kind of odd how the Swiss are so in to Bitcoin and Frankenstein's creature found his happiest hours in the Swiss Alps... ↩
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What's the deal with mountains and freedom? Have you ever noticed how mountain people are way more into freedom than the plains dwellers? There's got to be some kind of connection between rugged terrain and weak administrative states. I like mountains. ↩