Interview with the American crypto artist Lucho Poletti, who uses propaganda methods to shake our consciousness spreading the message that money can emancipate itself from the control of the States.
Lucho Poletti, also known as hodlcrypto, is a visual artist who develops his propaganda art in order to impel humanity to think and live freely. Luis spreads the truth about the control systems that rule our world, while showing us what we can do to free ourselves from these invisible chains. Despite his training in corporate finance and business analysis, he left his corporate career and moved to Mexico to devote himself completely to his artistic work. Lucho, who also belongs to the group of crypto artists that we share in Telegram, shows in this interview his vision about art, economy and new tools to free humanity from its old chains.
Lucho Poletti.
Your studies on finance must have given you a very complete view of the internal functioning of the economy. When did your interest in the world of cryptocurrencies begin?
My interest started after seeing the result of one of the bubbles in the Bitcoin price like the one that occurred in 2013, although I was more interested when I saw that the price stabilizing again in 2016 and continuing to grow with the rest of the market. I saw new cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum and Litecoin, and I wanted to know why they were also growing up with Bitcoin. I wanted to know how they were different, and what potential they had to increase in price. Basically, my interest in the first days was purely speculative.
So, I continued the process of learning the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies, the values of decentralization and resistance to censorship, and I realized that we can use them as a super powerful tool in a possible revolution against banks.
In my experience with finance, I learned many things about how economic systems work and the role of central banks, but it isn't really common for someone with this background to leave the university and start looking for their own answers to questions like:
Why is there a fractional reserve system in almost every country in the world that creates all the money from nothing but debt? Why do they always make the value of national currencies fall, basically stealing the savings of the public? Why are private banks controlling all interest rate and inflation policies? Yes, of course I learned the «official» answers to some of these questions in my mastery, but you gain a different understanding when you go on your own search for the truth.
«Currency Independence» (Lucho Poletti).
Why do you think they represent a better system than the current financial model?
There are many reasons, but mainly I think it is one of the most fundamental rights that people have (or that people do not have): the ability to choose their currency. All the governors have historically known a golden rule of power: control the currency and you will control the people.
One of the characters from the infamous banking elite, Nathan Rothschild, publicly declared: «Give me the control of a nation's money, and I will not care who writes the laws». This, for me, is a reality. In my opinion, the government is here to mentally enslave us. Some people see the chains and look for the key. Other people feel comfortable with their slavery. For me, this is a complex issue, but for the sake of analogy, I will say that the banking system and its debt obligation on national states and their citizens are like the chains that bind us. Government agencies and media corporations that keep us online and distracted are like the chains that bind us to these chains, our bondage to debt, and prevent us from getting far enough to find the key. For me, cryptocurrencies and the movement of decentralized money are an important key.
In addition to regaining control over our money through cryptocurrencies, the blockchain movement has the potential to return our privacy and prevent us from being censored in other areas, and blockchain technology and open source software development can be used to make obsolete the methods that technocracy has developed to control so many aspects of our lives instead of creating decentralized systems.
«Sign the Declaration» (Lucho Poletti).
How were your beginnings in the world of crypto art?
I started doing some t-shirts for fun, for a podcast I was doing with a couple of friends. It was called «Bitcoin Fomo». If you look at my Instagram, there are still a couple of designs from my first days.
Over time, as I learned more, my passion for the cryptocurrency movement grew. I began to change my creative efforts and my artistic expression to crypto and started working on the «Hodl Crypto» set of works almost exclusively.
What are your influences?
In terms of visual artists, Shepard Fairey has influenced me to the fullest. From him I adopted some aspects of my propaganda style and a mentality that treats my art project as a kind of experiment in phenomenology. If you repeat a message over and over again, along different images and enough people see them, their messages and images become a phenomenon.
People recognize their similarity and want to know what it is about. Although the first experiments of Fairey in phenomenology lacked meaning, they achieved something important for the art world, street art and this new digital world that, in my opinion, is analogous to street art: they use the same tactics as the sellers and the big corporations use to sell us things. But instead of selling you things, I am trying to make you confront the issue of the use of cryptocurrencies and their immediate importance in your life.
Other influences include Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Leonardo da Vinci and Eugenia Loli. To be honest, I'm not the kind of person who always looks at other people's art. I try to find ideas of spoken and written words: podcasts, comedians, the writings of certain authors. In this sense, some of my major influences include comedians George Carlin and Bill Hicks, psychologists such as Jung and Jordan Peterson, and authors such as Robert Greene, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Steven Pressfield.
«I Want You to Use Bitcoin» (Lucho Poletti).
What techniques do you use?
I do everything in Adobe Illustrator. Since I went to business school, I never took a formal art class in my life, I was self-taught, so I think what I do is pretty basic. I create forms, I use some words to complete my ideas around the forms, I decide where I want to place the images and I start to draw them, and sometimes, transforming and reappropriating images of the public domain to add them to my art. One of the things I really love about Eugenia Loli's art is her ability to juxtapose completely different images and transform a combination of them to provide a deeper meaning. Some of those images are very provocative. When I see something like that, I just think: "bright." I hope that people can react to some of my art in that way.
What possibilities does the crypto economy offer to artists?
The crypto economy, in my opinion, is very much in its infancy, and for the artists, although we can see a lot of potential, I consider that there are opportunities during this stage in more than one position, especially during this bear market. For a while, some artists made their living just by creating art for dapps and non-fungible tokens, but no one is using those dapps now. I hate being negative, but it's just the reality of things. The artists are rushing here as in any other niche, but I think being on the right platforms, establishing the right relationships and associations and that kind of things is the opportunity for now, that will see rewards once the market stabilizes and prepare for further growth.
«Separation of Money and State» (Lucho Poletti).
Will cryptocurrencies replace fiat money?
Yes, in one way or another, digital currencies and assets are the way of the future. JP Morgan has just announced its own centralized stable currency, so it's quite telling where things are going. I believe that Ripple (XRP) will play an important role in the adoption of digital assets, although I am not a supporter of the project personally.
What blockchain projects do you find most interesting today?
For me, Bitcoin will always have a special place, a sort of golden backup for the rest of the digital market. It is really difficult to say which projects are going to work well and will offer the most real value in the world. I have always been a fan of the IOTA project because it seems that the technology will work very well for machine-to-machine transactions in the future. I also believe that the Singularity Network's AGI token is an interesting project, but it seems very likely that it will also play a role in AI's takeover of humanity if it manages to create the largest decentralized network of artificial intelligences that learn together and are paid autonomously. A couple of smaller projects that I find interesting are Tokenpay, due to the commercial focus of the project, and Polymath, due to its focus on the tokenization of securities. Whoever solves commercial applications or security tokens should be very successful in my opinion.
«DYOR» (Lucho Poletti).
Your works of art are loaded with symbolism, like the mask of Guy Fawkes or the seven-pointed star. What is its meaning?
Yes, I use my version of the Fawkes mask to represent a kind of spirit behind the Bitcoin movement. It is completely symbolic, sometimes it represents the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto (established in a seven-pointed star, which symbolizes creation, that is, the seven days of creation). I refer to this image as my «Satoshi mask» and it is a kind of my brand that I use to capture people's attention and give them the feeling that some anonymous revolutionary is sending them a message or order to use Bitcoin and start paying attention to that. Unlike almost all other cryptocurrencies, which have a dominant face in the brand (for example, Litecoin = Charlie Lee, Ethereum = Vitalik Buterin), Bitcoin has no leader. My Satoshi mask serves to convey messages of a movement without leaders.
«Buy Low, Sell Never».
What main ideas do you intend to communicate through your pieces?
The unifying theme in my art is the importance of cryptocurrencies. I feel that most outsiders do not understand why they are important, whether it is from a political, technological or financial point of view, there is a gap in their understanding that needs to be addressed.
If you browse through my gallery, you will find some pieces. Monetary-style ones, for example, convey many reasons why people should use them: so that they can be their own bank and control their own money, to obtain a higher level of independence (do not trust banks that inflate your savings), to have a money that is resistant to censorship and that you can use for whatever you want, etc. Other pieces point more towards the current crypto community, urging them to worry less about the price and focus more on pushing this movement forward. I also dedicated some pieces to show the diversity of Bitcoin's appeal, like my series «6 Bitcoins for any party»: six cans of soup that seem to be commercialized for six different groups within the political spectrum of the United States. It really depends on my emotional state and what is happening, but I would say that there is a good diversity of variations in my artwork, which communicate different ideas.
«Use Crypto Currency» & «Fiat Currency Is Obsolete» (Lucho Poletti).