CAN THE BLOCKCHAIN SAVE THE YOUNG (from themselves)?
The Real Politics of the Blockchain
One of the arguments for why Octopuses have not managed to make the jump to high technology in the past few million years is that, despite being spookily intelligent, their young are free floating little sea creatures rather than being raised by parents. No way to build culture. EVERY GENERATION STARTS FROM ZERO.
Humans can’t start from zero — we need to learn from previous generations.
Today’s younger generations are as adrift on the internet, on the infinite seas of the information environment, as baby octopuses are in the vast depths of the open ocean. The only things which are stable reference points are archaic (religion) or capitalised (product-based identities). Equally abyssal.
But Humans can’t start from zero — we need to learn from previous generations. Some say cave paintings were used to teach younger people how to hunt! We have been at this a while.
So I’m thinking again about how to handle the political disenfranchisement of young people through the blockchain, building on something I wrote a while back. The hopes and dreams of a better world where people have individual agency and great collective power are deep-rooted in blockchain culture. Can we deliver that dream?
I believe we can but it needs some careful cultural thinking about how young people got so screwed over by the economy and socially atomized, and what might be needed to fix it. It’s all about “frontier” and getting away from incumbents to places where it’s genuinely possible to create something.
Also humans live a really, really long time which means you can have me — a Gen X “90s kid” — tell you what I think about the situation. In contrast Octopuses only live about five years so their elders are pre-school. But in the 1990s we had almost exactly the same obsessions that the current generation has and my hope is that we can help you find a way fowards.
Does any of this look familiar? Hell we’re even fighting the same companies.
Can we deliver the dream?
I was part of an internet community in the early 1990s. People all over the world. Our symbol? A simple “@“ because nobody else had a cultural identity as an email user.
Just think about that for a second. You’re driving around in some suburb looking for your friend’s house, that you only know from the internet, and you pass a mailbox with an “@“ symbol printed on a piece of paper and taped to the outside of the mailbox. “Internet People Here”. It’s like seeing the Bitcoin logo on a shop, or the Ethereum logo on a conference.
You know that in this place you’re part of The Network.
Go back to the age of rail and there were Hobo Code symbols. The “@“ symbol was our technomad code. “Internet People Here”.
That’s 30 years ago. It’s as distant from 2023 as the 1960s were for us in the 1990s. It’s an entire world away.
Fashion used to play the same role. Subcultural branding and tagging and identity all woven together. You’ve seen these guys? London in the 1980s had one of the most extreme fashion subcultures ever seen. That version of punk was expensive in money and opportunity costs. Social proof!
The people that paid that cost were in it together against the world — out-in group.
Of course, with those people it was:
Today, by and large, young people are not responding like this; it is notable that in the 21st century the thriving ferment of street subcultures has largely died out except as nostalgia trends (although, even then, no one has brought back psychobilly — no one should bring back psychobilly).
So now everybody’s on the internet. Young people who skipped college are sitting around at home trading crypto in their teens, and then moving to Singapore for tax reasons in their 20s (or whatever). In an infinite sea of faces, who are your people? Who do you invest in knowing? And I do mean “invest in knowing” — relationship building takes time, and young people invest in it very, very, hard.
Who do you invest in knowing?
Today, while young people still deal with this through aesthetics, these are wider ranging and more diffuse than just clothing, and they do it through social media. Let’s talk social media’s “aesthetic” obsession. From Cottagecore to Dark Academia, what does social media’s obsession with creating aesthetics say about us? And why is it such a problem? The aesthetic subcultures folks follow “alpha” (information) flows, and you need money to buy in. You become a “VSCO girl” or go “Cottagecore” and it costs you a few dozen hours of analysis and a few thousand dollars of purchases. Now you look like Those Other People. Outside of college campuses etc. the Cottagecore Community doesn’t really meet in reality. This is all online. It’s much the same economic cost as buying into a mid-price NFT project. It’s almost like we’re all trying to anchor in the enormous full emptiness of the internet.
You can see the same thing in the photography “community” — all the Fuji buyers making “film like” into a thing, while the Nikon buyers are showing off their P1000 shots of birds feeding their babies 4.5km away with the superzoom goodness. It’s markets being used as community mediums. Buy this product to find your people.
Other people anchor through economics. I think that the heavy slant of the blockchain space towards libertarianism, autism, Asperger’s, Nerd Culture, and the general social blunting that comes with working with machines (I could hardly talk when I was a computer graphics engineer) is partly responsible for this. Crypto-socio-economics — binding people together with economically shared incentives through things like NFTs or DAOs is a nerd response to living in an atomized society. — with people for whom aesthetics don’t appeal, economics may do the job of bringing people together.
Other people anchor through economics
So I think what’s happening in the NFT space, and to a limited degree in stuff like L2 chains or crappy little L1s, is a similar kind of social anchoring. “You’ve got $20,000 of Dogecoin? Well we’re 100% on the same team. Go Doge!” Because otherwise people just drift away online. There’s no cost to leaving the community so people do, often silently.
The only way we know how to answer the question of “who are you?” Is socially.
Family names. “John of Sudbury”. “Joe Baker”. Given names. I travelled all over America in the 1990s on “@“. The story of “who am I?” was tightly coupled to the social technology of the day: email lists. I don’t think nearly enough work has been done on the “economic sociology” of crypto projects, particularly DAOs and NFT communities. Now that I’m seeing this head-on, it all makes so much more sense. A single framework with aesthetic and “-core” cultures, NFTs and DAOs together. This also neatly explains the early adopter communities on Twitter, Instagram and, earlier than that, Flickr (really the first social network for people that made images rather than writing as a way of expressing their identity) — influencers as social leaders: reference point organisers. In ancient times this was one of the functions of soap operas: people who worked in the same office but lived in different communities could gossip about people they both “knew” outside of the workplace, those being the cast of Friends etc — Yes, I know this sounds incredibly dumb. But 30 years ago (!) there were academic publications as people discovered this phenomena!
I don’t think nearly enough work has been done on the “economic sociology” of crypto projects
So the idea that what we have is economic responses to social atomization is not a new one but I’m seeing it in a new way because I’ve got it from two sides right now: “aesthetic” culture from YouTube etc. and NFT/DAO from crypto.
This is almost gendered, women and men. Almost.
As we have transformed our physical and social environment further and further from the environment that we evolved in, it becomes harder and harder for us to find the true happiness which is harmony between our own nature and nature itself. We love dogs and BBQs beside water. No form of happiness is more universal than a few families and friends gathering to grill food on a beach or by a lake. That’s where we evolved. That’s our native environment at its best.
Food, fire and friends beside water.
Ape Utopia.
That’s what people are seeking in these internet cultures, but are they finding it?
Once, in the ’90s, when the internet was young, we did this with mailing lists and newsgroups, we had little social communities where like-minded people found each other and generated whole new friendship groups that didn’t rely on geography or finding the right pub. There’s even an archived list of all the “cyberpunk” email lists from the 1990s. Isn’t that amazing? It was all DIY and profoundly uncommercial. but this was basically commodified and destroyed by social media that first co-opted it, then corrupted it by filtering the messages and monetising the interactions, so the groups no longer felt like “home”.
This was commodified and destroyed by social media
You can see why an entire generation of innovators latched on to crypto because it seemed like it could, in theory, reinvent that uncommercial sense of online community by owning the commercial aspects collectively, and then offer social solidarity at the “tribal” and potentially even the “municipal” level through larger projects like Ethereum.
Ethereum Nation.
But it’s all stretched. We can’t actually live inside of the metaverse. The people who own the same NFTs as you do might be too far away and too alien to babysit your kids. The core biological reality of our lives is only very slightly improved by online community. Life still happens in the real world and this is what’s producing the crazy addictive (often life damaging) effects: it doesn’t matter how much you drink wine if what you need is coffee. The strongest online communities are still only reflections and shadows of “food, fire and friends beside water.” Social media does not give people what they actually need. That’s why we keep scrolling.
We can’t actually live inside of the metaverse
People are growing up untethered: fashion doesn’t indicate identity when you can drop $200 at Shein and walk out with an entirely new wardrobe. There’s no social cost to weird hair. There’s no geographic binding after high school really. The idea that what we have is a set of broad pathologies based on the conditions of internet atomization resulting in community inclusion being mediated by products, in other words you have to buy your friends, is fucking brutal. I’ve heard it before, but only understood it for myself now; it is a desperate position for a social monkey to find itself in.
Community inclusion being mediated by products is fucking brutal
This is not the utopia you are seeking — it’s “pay to play tribalism”. This is unfortunate. You can see the perfect opportunity for people being exploited: you want to join a tribe and get to know people. You want to make money. The two impulses are joined in the DAO structure: a community you buy into. It’s a little bit like having a cult with elected leadership, or a multi-level marketing scheme which is owned by the members. The social dynamics are very similar to both cults and MLMs. The social dynamics fuse capitalism and society in a new and probably kinda dangerous way.
It’s “pay to play tribalism”
Clearly there’s a social binding force — but with that come problems. The combination of social solidarity and commerce is unsafe. We cannot make an atomized population powerful with either shallow social organisation or technology. To save the world — and here I’m thinking climate change — we need the most profound de-atomization imaginable (or maybe geoengineering).
We’re in a maze.
We’re building technologies without the end goal in sight. What people want at a shallow advertising-driven level and what people need at a “my life is whole and makes sense to me” level are way different. Instagram does not substitute for a better relationship with your sister. And this is the fundamental challenge of the “real world assets” phase of Ethereum. OK, now we can handle real estate on the blockchain in tokenized form. We really can: http://mattereum.com/land is a real deal and there’s way more coming.
Instagram does not substitute for a better relationship with your sister
But can we solve the social problems too? We’re already seeing the broad outlines of this attempt: Network States are “crypto communities do real estate” with kinda strange Silicon Valley logic applied.
Once you tease out the projects that are the Silicon Valley equivalent of a Sovereign Citizen play (i.e. opting out of existing nation state structures to avoid tax and law, while still physically living in the state) what they are is electronic communities organised around money rather than community: the people grew up atomized: never felt community. We get regular pings from people with ambitions of doing community land projects and building physical settlements with crypto finance as an integral part of the start up plan, often with community governance done using DAOs or other crypto voting methods.
People are reaching.
This is really the key.
If we’re going to ship large-scale community-oriented real estate development projects that actually deliver “food, fire and friends beside water” at scale we’re going to need to figure out the sociological issues which have made modern community so hard. Winding up a Network State that failed is going to be much harder than winding up a company or shuttering a community.
People think they want tokenized real estate. They need community. They won’t be happy with tokenized real estate unless it delivers community.
That is part of why there is so much interest in DAOs and Network States. People want to be reconnected to each other. That’s the fundamental human drive at the heart of all of this. Yes, professional real estate clients want faster transactions and so on. Yes, Mattereum can deliver that. But their clients want community. The enormous cultural push towards de-atomizing society and returning to interconnected forms is unstoppable: it is human nature returning to being human after centuries of industrial oppression.
Post-industrial society is like post-war society: an attempt to return to peace.
Professional real estate clients want faster transactions but their clients want community
As we move down the pathway towards tokenized community real estate projects, whether they be Network States or start-up villages or just plain old electronic communes, we’re going to wind up having to try and bring wisdom about community, not just the Mattereum legals.
It’s not like I haven’t lived in communities and studied them in detail for more than 30 years.
I do have grounded opinions about how to do this, and I think if we invested in researchers and worked closely with clients we could actually deliver functional community templates. And that is, after all, probably the highest good that Mattereum can deliver to retail customers: better arrangements for buying their houses and managing shared assets with their neighbours.
The highest good that Mattereum can deliver: better arrangements for buying houses and managing shared assets
Professional finance needs precision and efficiency. But homeowners need warm relations. Bad governance and bad finance produce stone cold grinding poverty: Homeowners Associations and sharecropping. If we actually go into this tokenized real estate thing with a clear sense of the end goals in mind it might be a lot easier than we think: nobody’s tried with lawyers. “Good fences make good neighbours”, and a contract is nothing but a fence of written words. The legal structures are all there: there’s no reason for Homeowners Associations to be terrible.
There’s no reason shared ownership has to be predatory. Societies do not have to be the way they are; we can change them.
So — what does this all mean? Well, my parents’ generation were part of the post-war economic boom. The economy was buoyant and everyone, whatever their income was, floated up on the tide. Until, basically, the 1980s; Thatcher, Reagan and neo-liberal economics, which, as a matter of policy, was “every person for themselves” — there’s no such thing as society. Those who had money were able to leverage more at the expense of those with less, because money translates to power, allowing them to become obscenely rich while everyone else’s income stagnated. We weren’t going to do better than our parents, the first generation in a century to say that.
For my parents, stability and community was home, family, the workplace. Young people today are priced out of owning a house, or even stably renting one, there’s no expectation of long-term jobs or even a single career through your working life, let alone staying in the same place. But they still want “food, fire and friends beside water” (and also cats) and where they are looking for it is online, but the neo-liberals got there first and have commodified, monetized and corrupted the will for online community, so they end up basically with “pay-to-play” friends. Is it any wonder people are starting to have romantic relationships with AI Chatbots? The blockchain offers a way round that, a means to create a self-generated trusted community, to build structures that are egalitarian, supportive and nurturing through DAOs and similar. To do this needs more than good will, it needs law, it needs appropriate fences to keep out the thieves, scammers and profiteers. The current global operating system is broken, its head has been severed and it is running on reflexes, not quite aware it is dead yet. Politicians pull the levers and wonder why they no longer work, resorting to “dead cat” distractions to hide the fact they have no functioning policies.
Nettles need to be grasped and the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem needs to take form.
There are ways forward. We need to build them.
Next, I will take a look at possible ways to do this — watch this space!
