If crypto is bunk then Henry Ford should watch Interstellar
A little more than a century ago, the soon-to-be ubiquitous American industrialist and committed pacifist Henry Ford declared that ‘history is bunk more or less’ because he disdained tradition and wanted progress to bring about peace.
This columnist is somebody who believes that time is circular and that the future, the past and the present-present are all part of the same continuum, so I do not agree with Henry Ford… although there are many who would say, and love to say, that crypto is bunk, period. Not even ‘more or less’. We know who you are.
Most people who have seen the film Interstellar would be with me, that movie being the source of most of my scientific opinions and much else besides. I could watch that movie every day and believe it to be, quite possibly, the Word of God.
Ford, of course, changed the world with the world’s first affordable ‘motor car’ – the model T – that by 1918 dominated the market and came from the world’s first assembly line and the notion of mass production.
One man, globally dominant in transportation? Extraordinary that more than 100 years later, Elon Musk has emulated the omnipresence of Henry Ford and while the means of production are now more sophisticated and it is open space rather than the open road that is now the dream, the comparisons are obvious.
More in common
Bizarrely, both men have much more in common than providing mobility for the masses and that is the value and reality of currency. Completely bypassing Muskisms and his odd Tony Stark behaviour because too much is made of this nonsense, Ford himself was a very early progenitor of different currencies.
Aligning with his pacifism and belief that gold was controlled by countries who liked to wage war, then the alternative would be an ‘energy dollar’ based on the natural wealth of its energy resources. In those days it would have obviously been oil, coal and gas, not solar or wind.
Ford’s premise was that gold was controlled and energy resources could not be (how wrong he was), but his basic philosophy was decentralisation and that the value of his currency would be an amount of energy equal to one dollar that was exerted over an hour.
That sounds uncannily like Bitcoin to me, but in the weirdest way possible. Mining, energy, over-exertion of energy, volatility, resource-depletion.
One could even suggest that Ford was the original ‘climate change devil’ and, by creating the Model T, he was responsible for a lot of ye olde global warming that we are trying to grasp and manage as the end of the world beckons.
Ford would not have called his energy dollar decentralisation, more like de-control and that’s perhaps what decentralisation is anyway. The crypto evangelists, and let’s be honest, the traditionally disadvantaged, want control as much as anything else.
Sort them out
Crypto is a broad church, but there are many, many sinners within it and I’m sure not all of them have heard the gospel of Interstellar. That would sort them out.
Ford’s perspicacity in creating the assembly line did not happen with his idea of the energy dollar and he also suffered massive fails such as spelt out by the wonderful book Fordlandia when Ford tried to commandeer the Amazon rainforest to create a rubber supply chain that was about as successful as the Nazis trying to create a post-war eugenic empire in other parts of South America.
All of these questions, possibilities, prophecies and global currencies can rock the post-pandemic mind when social pleasure is much more important than internal cerebral conflicts.
However, in times of change and transformation, there is always Interstellar and as much as I love football and the Euros, that’s my evening entertainment sorted because that film will never, ever, ever be bunk… not now, not then, not ever.
Monty Munford is a tech journalist and the chief evangelist and core contributor to the Sienna Network project. He also runs his own crypto podcast https://blockspeak.io
He WAS a keynote speaker/emcee/moderator/interviewer at prestigious events around the world until Covid destroyed his conference speaking career… until 2023. He has spoken at more than 200 global events.