The Law Trials #5: Shadow Money
The Premise
The current shift in government policy toward cryptocurrency does little to make the potential transformative nature of the technology accessible to the masses. While the underlying blockchain technology has strong appeal in Afrofuturist circles, the implementation of cryptocurrency, especially now, has warning signs that need to be considered if the promise of liberation often linked to the technology will be achieved. Putting the question to LLM trained to think with Afrofuturist ideas in mind does not solve the problem; instead, as is the case with all the Law Trials, I’m interested in how the machine mixes and matches to come up with interesting moments of intervention, reflection, and speculation.
Afrofuturist Response to the Rise of Crypto (2025)
The current administration’s aggressive pivot to cryptocurrency — embracing Bitcoin, promoting memecoins like TrumpCoin, and signaling openness to dismantling existing financial oversight — represents a seismic shift in U.S. financial policy. But from an Afrofuturist perspective, this crypto moment invites a radical reinterpretation: not just about finance, but about freedom, narrative, and technological justice.
The Problem: Extraction Disguised as Innovation
The crypto push valorizes speculative markets as liberation while destabilizing regulatory structures meant to protect the public from fraud, data exploitation, and environmental degradation. As Brookings warns, this deregulation masks deeper harm to working-class and marginalized communities, who remain most vulnerable to crypto scams, volatility, and surveillance.
Yet these harms are reframed as "economic freedom" — a techno-utopian myth that mirrors earlier eras of racialized extraction: from convict leasing to redlining to tech-enabled gentrification.
Afrofuturist Reframe: Crypto as Cultural Resistance or Neocolonial Mirage?
Afrofuturism, in the tradition of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, and contemporary scholars and artists, demands that we see the future as contested terrain. It is not neutral. Cryptocurrency, when detached from community-centered ethics, becomes just another iteration of “the futures industry” — what Kodwo Eshun calls the space where technoscience and market prediction erase Black possibility and reinscribe techno-capitalist dystopias.
Memecoins aren’t freedom — they’re spectacle. They hijack technological narrative space, flattening collective futures into monetized mythologies centered around whiteness, masculinity, and spectacle. They offer no real alternatives for Black and marginalized communities beyond speculative participation in rigged economies.
Afrofuturist Intervention: Build the Black Crypto Commons
Afrofuturism doesn’t reject crypto — it remixes it. A true Afrofuturist crypto future:
Uses blockchain to preserve memory: Rather than erasing historical figures like Oscar Mack or the Tulsa Massacre, blockchain could be a decentralized tool for Black communal storytelling, data sovereignty, and reparative archives.
Centers community autonomy over speculative capital: As Julian Chambliss suggests, Afrofuturism promotes “imaginary activism” rooted in Black cultural knowledge systems, not digital gold rushes.
Reclaims data as relationship, not commodity: Echoing Alisha Wormsley’s framework, Afrofuturist AI and crypto must be feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist by design, structured around consent, care, and collectivism.
Fosters a new Black financial imaginary: Not as participation in Trumpian coins, but as cooperative economies grounded in mutual aid, legacy, and justice. The "Black Future Industry" is not a stock ticker; it is a networked, slow-grown economy of joy, memory, and resistance.
Call to Action: Crypto Without Liberation Is Just Capitalism in Costume
The current crypto vision is a hologram — a technoslick illusion of prosperity that replicates the logics of empire. Afrofuturism challenges us to imagine otherwise. If there are “Black people in the future,” our technologies, including crypto, must reflect Black histories, geographies, and dreams.
Let us not merely enter the blockchain; let us reprogram it. For collective memory. For economic justice. For futures that do not need Trump's face on a coin to feel real.
