The albino crabs begin to migrate, pursuing the sun. The massive grayish gathering could be seen from an altitude of thirty kilometers—the darkness from which the crabs came had changed; they could no longer breathe inside it. Movements on the surface connect to movements in the depths. Those on the surface are accompanied by invisible contrary forces, each with its own vectors and subterranean aims. Given the finite nature of the human era, eventually they come to dominate the culture as brutally as the ravages of nature.

In the 1960s, a group of young people tries to randomize their actions: they aim to separate their existence from the masses, the mainstream. They are known as hippies, their collective attempt is to ignore the laws established by their parents. But how to break a law inherited en masse? Their rebellion consists of inserting moments of chaos into established patterns of conduct; they call these randomizations “liberty.” A plan to become unique by generating an unrepeatable life pattern modulates their behavior; the noisy surface of the 1960s and ’70s moves erratically through the cities and insists on its “revolutionary” status.

At a deeper, more silent level, another group of brilliant and impatient young people is giving birth to a more silent eclosion: a turn toward abstraction. They lay no claim to revolutionary status: they are in fact conservative, even square. Though they do have a precise sense of lifestyle, their chosen battlefield has nothing to do with musical tastes, political tendencies, sexual habits, or fashion. It will be the conservatives that will lead an insurrection ascendent and long lasting in the fundamental makeup of capital.

In the following decade, the obscure conservative heroes of this generation will begin by disassociating money from its backing in gold. Little by little, paper currency will draw for itself a curve that grows ever more distant from its reference—a tendency shared by abstract and conceptual art. At the center of these tendencies, a new legal and theoretical structure will slowly come into being, one that will lead to the financial revolution of the 1980s, and in the years that follow, will allow for contortions and iterations at greater and greater levels of abstraction, building one on the next, consuming themselves as they go, until capital is virtualized into what it was always meant to be: a self-generating ouroboros of bits.

The movement’s early resonant hits will sing of the rise of Wall Street—of the decline of traditional economic resourcefulness in favor of corporate restructuring and junk bonds. But Wall Street will be just a rite of passage: the separation of money from its backing in gold will reach new highs and lows with the securitization of debt and derivatives and the collapse of September 2008. Only a few days after the fall of Lehman Brothers, in October of that year, the phoenix of capital would begin to rise again with the publication of “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” and the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto will birth the blockchain. Completely void of any connection to anything real, money will find its true Hegelian self in cryptocurrency. A consciousness of its own.

One movement works as the surface, where visible change occurs; the other movement is the structure, hidden beneath the flow of mortal life. The two movements—hippie/randomizing and financial/conservative—share a disdain for industrial corporations and factories, the former because industry embodies the values of their parents, which they are obliged to reject, and the latter because industry entails a theory of value that competes with the absolute liberalism that the poetic flight of capital (Viz. ever more distant from the gold standard) seeks for itself. And both movements endeavor to rise beyond the guiding industrial paradigm of progress. Their hearts bear the mark of technology.