ftx, white collar crime, and the quest to reshape our future into a cyberpunk dystopia

Sam Bankman-Fried may be going to prison, but those who inspired him to open FTX and turned a blind eye to his crimes are still out there.

It seems like the powers that be decided to throw the book at Sam Bankman-Fried by sentencing him to 25 years in prison and $11 billion in restitution payments for using his crypto exchange FTX as his personal piggy bank and slush fund for a hedge fund on the side. This is not a slap on the wrist by any means, and much more than the six years his defense team thought would be punishment enough. Personally, I think this is a perfectly fair sentence. If holding up a gas station at gunpoint for a few hundred in sweaty fivers means you’ll be facing up to 30 years behind bars, wiping out billions for tens of thousands of people should come with severe repercussions.

Sure, it’s just money, there was no violence, it was handed over willingly, and there is a possibility that the victims could be made whole or earn their money back. However, it isn’t a guarantee because the court declaring that FTX’s victims are owed $11 billion doesn’t mean the money is out there to collect on, and even if it was, the process can take over a decade when we consider a comparable scenario with Bernie Madoff. And in the meantime, bills still have to be paid, homes may be lost, inheritances wiped out, retirees are forced to return to work, and critical savings for emergencies will be gone. Some may even die waiting on their restitutions.

The point here is that just because the crime didn’t happen at gunpoint and with very explicit threats, but with computers and lies, doesn’t mean it was any less grievous. In fact, it was millions of times worse. But there’s yet another, even more disturbing layer to Bankman-Fried’s crime. You see, the idea to launch FTX was formulated on to the advice of the so-called effective altruism movement, which is an arm of the e/acc and Longtermism lobbies. Ostensibly, the movement preaches that those with the means should accumulate as much wealth as possible to help future generations. The catch is that the generations they want to help may not be born for thousands of years.

They started out with pilot projects showing how small, tactical investments can yield enormous returns, preaching that it didn’t matter how the money got there, just that if it was used for a good outcome and the consequences of using it were positive, that was good enough. It’s also an extremely attractive ideology for the obscenely wealthy who believe that by the virtue of being wealthy, they’re better with money than plebes in governments and NGOs who don’t have trust funds or vast stock portfolios. Instead of rocking the societal boat or paying more taxes, they get to stay in control of who’ll benefit from their largesse.

As effective altruists started to preach Longtermist views, they began to simply hoard the money they made, and used a pittance of it to hire recent college grads and event planners to lobby major decision makers in governments around the world to let tech projects run wild with no regulations. Playing around with crypto was just another way to have more money available at some indeterminate point in the future as Bankman-Fried was their disciple, and their ideology is not concerned about the damage done in the process. So what if it takes decades for people to get repaid? They’re worried about millennia from now, not a few paltry human lifetimes.

Even worse, they were warned about his shenanigans and chose to ignore every one of those warnings because, again, their ideology allows them to take proceeds from financial crimes to be used for good deeds, morally and ethically laundering them. But ultimately, this all comes down to the question of control. Effective altruists, and their Longtermist and Accelerationist fellow travelers are not interested in charity itself. No, first and foremost, their interest lies in using extravagant wealth for shaping our future into their fantastic visions of trillions of us across the cosmos with them as Dune-like feudal overlords. And anything done in service of that, good or ill, they can justify.