What it's like to be a woman reporter on a cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers
Laurie Penny (previously) got sent on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise -- a four-day cruise filled with "starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters" who solved the fact that there almost no women signed up using the "free market": they paid teen sex workers from Ukraine to ship out with them.
Penny is a superb writer, a master of empathizing with terrible people (that is, understanding where they're coming from) without sympathizing with them (forgiving them for their terribleness) -- it's a rare skill, the sort of thing that makes her essay collection Bitch Doctrine so essential.
She set sail on the cruise at an odd moment in the cryptocurrency bubble: with crypto valuations way, way down, cryptocurrency is getting harder and harder to sell as anything but a ponzi scheme. The "investors" on the trip are often very newly wealthy, and they are furiously engaged in attempts to convince one another to "invest" in new schemes that will shift the wealth that cryptos sucked out of the masses into fewer and fewer hands.
The grifters and true believers that Penny met onboard (sometimes the same people are both!) split their time from using Telegram to procure the services of sex workers and shouting at each other about block sizes. Penny gets right into the psyches and the compartmentalization that powers the whole scene.
Read the restOn most ideological bandwagons, there is usually a distinction between grifters and true believers. The grifters are in it for the fame and the money and will say any old bollocks to get either.
