LET’S TALK ABOUT VALUES
Earlier this year, it appeared we’d finally hit our peak in indifference and nihilism, and the slew of racist, sexist, and worse memecoins and blatant rugs were nothing but a practical implication thereof.
Why has crypto become a space where unethical behavior seems to thrive more than elsewhere without triggering much outrage?
For one, there is the issue of financial nihilism rooted in people feeling like they aren’t running toward a bright future anymore, but as Hartmut Rosa put it, running faster only to escape the abyss. If nothing else matters, it also does not matter if one runs a scam project to enrich oneself. After all, there’s no meaning in any of it, and the game is rigged.
Add to that the observation by Kierkegaard, who wrote:
“Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be oneself.”
In the age of social media, it seems we’d never have to be bored. Whenever the dread of existential boredom rises up, we can simply go on CT and share a hot take to kick off a raging discussion or take it further to launch a memecoin that’ll make us feel like we are someone again. In a sense, the financialization of everything, including access to your persona in the form of keys or fan tokens, is just another way to attach value to one’s persona.
Crypto is obsessed with values, so much so that nothing is holy from the grasp of tokenization, which aims to put a monetary value on everything.
Is that dehumanizing at times? Sure.
Is it a dangerous ideology? Probably. According to Yuval Noah Harari, Data-ism, the philosophy of reducing everything to data points — and what else is a price — is one of the biggest threats to humanity.
Whenever we allow market forces to govern social relationships, we end up with a mess, and the current state of crypto is a cautionary tale.
But how did we get here?
Crypto did not start with the mission of putting a price tag on everyone and minting new millionaires at the expense of the majority used as exit liquidity.
Bitcoin’s whitepaper is a token of idealism, born out of the desire to provide humans with an alternative to the existing financial system that had failed us in 2008. Ignoring the usual rules of Capitalism, governments bailed out Banks and threw thousands of people into despair.
That’s the backdrop of Bitcoin‘s birth, a p2p cash that aimed to be better than that. That was built with freedom in mind and as a challenge to existing power structures. Initially, anyone could mine Bitcoin with retail hardware, creating an accessible, decentralized network.
It was free and open to anyone to be part of the network.
Over ten years later, Bitcoiners are best known for their cringe-worthy tendency to bull post, endorsement of authoritarian leaders yolo-ing tax money into BTC, and their desire for a citadel so they can live in peace free from all the shit-coiners.
“Beside the crypto aristocracy, the only true beneficiaries of crypto [..] have been the very institutions that crypto evangelists supposedly aimed to overthrow: Wall Street and the Big Tech conglomerates.”
- Yanis Varoufakis in Technofeudalism
Things don’t look much better in other realms of broader crypto, where ponzis, rugs, and VC-money-fueled private rounds gave us a bunch of alt-L1 zombie ecosystems with millions of bots farming the wasteland.
Now, one possible attitude, and not an uncommon one, is to shrug and say, “That’s life.” You might think there is no way to influence what happens in a permissionless ecosystem, and neither should we, as that will erode the appeal and value prop.
In January 2024, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, and Sam Hart published Crypto’s Three Body Problem, in which they look at crypto through the lens of Lessig’s legal theories.
The biggest issue they identify is our belief that code is the law and that anything permissive by it is acceptable.
“…regression to code erods social norms, and this accounts in large part for what repulses people from crypto.”
- Crypto’s Three Body problem.
The Mango Market exploits come to mind, with half of CT cheering the hacker on for their disingenuous, highly profitable trading strategy. For a more holistic overview of the results of our laissez-faire attitude to lawless behavior, scroll Web3 is going great.
Techn-utopists will suggest all we need is better code.
I have news for you.
Better code isn’t going to fix it.
The only thing that will repair at least some of the damage is if we start figuring out the social layer and build a culture with a clear positioning against certain behaviors.
Even if you don’t care about the ecosystem as a whole (you should if you are cheering on any project in it), if the thesis of chain abstraction plays out, no one will care about any one chain anymore. Eventually, differentiating factors will not be the TPS nor a close affiliation with Big Tech (honestly, that warrants an entire rant that crypto is so in bed with all the centralized players we were supposed to stand up against) — it’ll come down to culture.
And at the moment, it’s looking pretty bad.
Even casinos do a much better job than crypto does. Casinos go to great lengths to assure customers that the game is fair and their playground is safe.
Therefore, saying crypto is a casino might be offensive to the latter. Crypto is not fair anymore. The game is usually rigged, meritocracy remains at large a chimera, and few people get filthy wealthy and then might go off engaging at worst in crypto colonialism.
It’s not a coincidence that the network state is getting branded as Techno-Fascism, and Crypto’s amour-fou for Trump doesn’t help.
Now what?
It’s time crypto goes back to the Values that started it. It’s time to reassert our positioning, not as yet another tool in the surveillance capitalist toolkit nor as a convenient way for exploitation.
Wasn’t this supposed to be an egalitarian freedom technology that allows humans to thrive?
Authoritarianism is on the rise, and any new threat to nations, like pandemics and terrorism, offer new ways to enhance surveillance, slowly eating at our privacy.
Not that we were too precious about it, mindlessly trading it in for the quick dopamine of flame emojis.
With every Big Tech company now trying to get a moat in training their LLMs, do you think they’ll not train their models on your images because you indicated so on Instagram?
It’s a big reason I started publishing most of my works signed with a public key and hashed on Arweave. At least, there’s proof that I wrote it.
That’s just a tiny example of blockchain providing something it was supposed to do. Verifiability. Transparency. Control for the writer behind the work and a claim to being the first.
Unless you’re okay with this industry continuing with its reputation as a place where ruthless scammers go to thrive,
Unless you want to have these conversations forever about how crypto isn’t just a bunch of hypocrites shouting about how this is the future of finance while failing to provide a secure ecosystem for someone to manage their finances,
Unless you’re okay with us being associated with a new form of colonialism,
It’s time to remember it wasn’t about number go up.
It was never about getting filthy rich.
It was always about freedom, privacy, and empowering humans to speak truth to power.
“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
- Thomas Mann (German Novelist)
Written by Near Intern / @NEAR_intern
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