The first few paragraphs from my latest publication, a contribution to the Science as Culture Forum on Tech Oligarchy titled Rite to Mine: Bitcoin, Ritual, and Oligarchy.

Forms of political rule can be usefully understood in terms of their official rituals. Monarchies have coronations. Representative democracies have elections. But what are the characteristic rituals of our present tech oligarchy? One obstacle to answering this question is the pejorative connotation of the term oligarchy itself. Aristotle defined oligarchy (literally ‘rule by the few’) as the corrupted form of aristocracy. Unlike democracy, which was also considered definitionally corrupt but has since gained a positive connotation, oligarchs rarely describe themselves as such.

The word ‘ritual’ raises similar problems, though scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have long employed the term as an analytical category. Operating theaters have been described as degradation rituals (O’Hara, Citation1989), demolition derbies as rituals of technological destruction (Zehr, Citation1995), materials science clean rooms as sites of ritual purification (Mody, Citation2001), and processes of security clearance as initiation rituals for nuclear scientists (Gusterson, Citation1996). Scientific rationality itself has been analyzed as a ritual performance in contexts ranging from nuclear regulation (Wynne, Citation1982) to genetic engineering (Jordan and Lynch, Citation1992). Rarely, however, does ritual appear as an actor's category. At least in the context of modern technoscientific practices, ‘ritual’ (like ‘oligarchy’) has usually been deployed in service of critique.

A notable exception to this rule, and a strong candidate for tech-oligarchy's defining ritual, is ‘crypto mining’: an energy-intensive computational practice through which Bitcoin and other digital cryptocurrency assets are produced and transacted using a cryptographic verification mechanism called proof of work (PoW). As I demonstrate at length below, crypto mining has been described in ritualistic terms not just by its critics, but also by many of its most passionate supporters. This is a puzzle: why is crypto mining, one of the most politically and environmentally consequential technological practices to emerge in the past 20 years, framed as a ritual practice by its detractors and boosters alike?

It is clear that crypto has helped accelerate the recent accumulation and concealment of oligarchic wealth. Since his re-election, Donald Trump and his family have gained over a billion dollars in Bitcoin and other crypto assets, which serve as a conveniently opaque and deniable means of bribery (Hawkins, Citation2025). The Bitcoin market, despite its pretensions to decentralization, is dominated by an extremely small and highly connected group of anonymous individuals (Ermann et al., Citation2018). The ritual framing of this oligarchic machinery, however, warrants closer attention.