The title of this mask is : Craig’s Cryotherapy Catastrophy. I usually name the masks in this series after important tech CEOs. I take their first name, and then try to find some alliteration with a beauty product or treatment. I don’t really have a clear, conscious reasoning behind this other than that I find it it funny. And that It makes intuitive sense to me.
This mask, however, isn’t named after a tech CEO. It takes its name from Craig Steven Wright, a computer scientist and businessman who claims to be the key figure behind the creation of Bitcoin, asserting that he is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto—the pseudonym of the mysterious individual who developed Bitcoin. His claims, though, are widely regarded as false by both the media and the cryptocurrency community.
I chose his name because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the creation of credit, the idea of the social person, and literary character.I’m reading Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic, and there’s a passage in which Baucom quotes Žižek on the formation of subjectivity and the emergence of paper money. It’s a bit long, but since almost no one actually reads these texts on my website anyway, I’ve decided they’re a good place to collect some of my thoughts—so I’ll include the quote here in full:
“It would be of great theoretical interest to establish the conceptual link between this genesis of self-consciousness and the modern notion of paper money. In the middle ages money was a commodity which so to speak guaranteed its own value: a gold coin — like any other commodity — was simply worth its "actual" value. How did we get from that value to today's paper money, which is intrinsically worthless, yet universally used to purchase commodities?Brian Rotman demonstrated the necessity of an intermediate term, the so called "imaginary money... deictically rooted in the signature of a particular named payee." ...In order to arrive at paper money as we know it today this deictic promise with concrete dates and names has to be depersonalized into a promise made to the anonymous "bearer" to pay the gold equivalent of the sum written on the paper-money - thus, the anchoring, the link to a concrete individual was cut loose. And the subject who came to recognize itself as this anonymous "bearer" is the very subject of self-consciousness ... [a subject that] has to relate to itself, to conceive of itself, as (to) an empty "bearer" and to perceive his empirical features which constitute the positive content of his particular "person" as a contingent variable. This shift is again the very shift from S to $."
I find that there’s a sort of irony to Craig Wright’s proclamation of being Satoshi Nakamoto. Asserting that he is Bitcoin’s creator seems like a strange effort to re-personalize something that what was deliberately anonymised. It’s somehow an attempt to tether a decentralized, bearer-centric system back to a single, yet disputed identity. Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic figure (or perhaps non-figure)—whose very existence is uncertain, who might be a person, a collective, a system, or even a myth—suddenly becomes Craig. Craig Wright. Bitcoin’s initial appeal depended very much on the absence of such a sovereign individual.
This claim of authorship feels like a reversal of the project’s original gesture: taking something founded on distributed trust and radical anonymity and reattaching it to the authority of a single, nameable subject. It’s as if reintroducing a recognizable origin story could somehow bolster the system’s credibility, even though the intial appeal of Bitcoin was that it resisted precisely that.