Blame the Apes: Why everything they told you about the Blockchain served no one but them

Whenever anyone first heard of Blockchain and Crypto, the first few sentences probably started like this; ‘it's about generational wealth homie’, ‘sell your art and get this bag’, ‘it’s a new world where we are getting rid of the middleman’, ‘true autonomy’, ‘we all gonna make it!’

All of this was said by someone you trust, whose eyes were set wide like they struck gold in the desert and are telling you first before anyone. I know, because I was one of them, wide-eyed zealots. Though I was earnest in wanting creatives to have more autonomy and still truly believe this is the whole point of blockchain tech; freedom is not a blanket term and neither is economy.

Regardless of when and how you entered the space, you were pitched financial gain and this is why and how we find ourselves now cursing cryptos name and licking our wounds. After 2 years of self-pleasing ourselves with our own voices on Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, buying into the hype because shit, folks were indeed making coins, but all of it was backed by little to no measurable value but in our hearts and insular markets. Yes, value can be subjective, but if we are truly talking about creating new markets, we need some objective value, metrics something!! Or perhaps measuring value differently as opposed to hoping for the best using the same old financial gimmicks. We are slowly exiting an era of ‘move fast and break shit’ but in this case, we should have questioned our own enthusiasm if we did not consider or imagine what we could be outside of who we’ve been.

The stock market is like astrology for men”

— Jokedao Maxi aka Madam Cult Leader

This was said in a Web3 Spaces earlier this Fall by the head of community at Wonderverse, a DAO management tool. Madam Cult Leader is Black and Queer and they really hit it on the head how speculative value markets have nothing real to back them up so value in many ways is measured by who says it's valuable. And that will always be aligned with the insidious drivers of traditional and late-stage capitalism; race, gender, and class.

In tech, for the last 30 years of disillusionment, when you bring up the big 3 in regard to new products, the traditional engineers, early adopters and benefactors of any tech wave will claim the BLOCKCHAIN…WEB3...IS NOT ABOUT RACE OR GENDER OR CLASS! It's color-blind, decentralized, and autonomous. A white man who professed to be race and gender-conscious angrily snapped back in a Spaces when it was suggested that Blockchain has a problem and is no different than what has come before it.

White neoliberals will see themselves as evolved, yet defensive when something new (tech) is heralded as the answer to the mess they created.

Well, I not only call BS, but I can also easily highlight the shit stains around collector culture and the manipulation of NFT markets. There are always exceptions, of course, but if 20th-century capitalism is the sweater-yarn-thick-thread throughout any market, that market will not be able to detach itself from what makes capitalism tick.

Capitalism, much like America can't and won’t separate itself from slave economy. It’s literally in everything

So why blame the Apes?

They didn't steal billions of dollars or make whole markets made to hibernate for a long GOT winter. This op-ed is not about specific greedy individuals who just used blockchain to act out behind a veil of a new way. It’s about Capitalist culture which the Bored apes personify how it shows up on the Blockchain. Those people who own Apes are not the issue, though some are the worst of Bro culture. No, the fact that a jpg of an ape is made valuable by being simply the first of its kind, or the best marketed, connected product, but has no, none, nada extrinsic value otherwise, is the problem with NFTs and well capitalism. The Bored Apes set and solidified a tone of NFT zealots, prioritizing scarcity, and alpha so you too can make more money from nothing.

If capitalism is a game we play then why not position blockchain tech/Web3/NFTs/Crypto as a way to change the rules? Why not invite people to imagine being free and how new systems of exchange may appear to the rest of us? How would a universe of value exchange interact with one another?

Would that not better fit into our current world of economic strife and question? As soon as we played to people's insecurities and hold up the prospects of money as a means to heal what was wrong with us, we punched our future in the gut.

Now it may take a minute to recover.

Choosing to prioritize speculative wealth over human ingenuity was our original sin.

Because we didn’t have a clear collective picture of societal needs and more importantly, our own wants and needs. Capitalism dictates we all want a lot of the same things so that monopolies can exist. Choice is an illusion if we all choose what we prioritize similarly through no autonomy of our own.

We missed out on an opportunity to join what has been a growing revolution toward reprioritizing our personal live; ie ‘quiet quitting’, and pandemic revelations that woke a lot of us up to how capatalism is a prison, and how we can else acquire sustainable happiness by other means. A collective reprioritization will naturally follow once people find personal freedom. But the crypto or Blockchain industry instead, now, has to take a few steps back to recover from our choices in the beginning.

Right now we have a branding issue because once again, a few got rich and became representatives of our so-called revolution and its propaganda.

We put the cart before the horse or the devil before the details.

The discourse throughout social media was not only convoluted and purposefully alienating, it never truly addressed our humanity and what we can imagine in the context of being raised by Western-designed capitalist indoctrination. Something that has rules of engagement that forsake the many for the few.

So here comes the Bored Apes. 10,000 jpegs that used marketing dollars to inflate or give the impression of collective value. Apes, in coder culture, are people who go ape and are all in over new products. But instead of introducing NFTs, crypto, tokens, and the lot of blockchain uses/products, as a means to fundamentally build an economy that is autonomous and WORKS! for a particular community/industry. Is it not as enticing to build a working economy that reflects our values? Instead, we said GET THIS BAG YO (full stop)! All else seemed tedious and secondary and quite frankly may not get me this bag quick enough!

But I thought we were talking about generational wealth here. Did you think that just meant your grandkids could have some loot though live in an even more toxic future where money is no balm?

What was possible for us all was sidelined as “social cause” or DEI projects. If the whole point that we have social causes is due to capitalism running a muck, how can you not see putting energy towards healing and sustaining those affected by capitalism offer sustainable wealth?

This inclination to backseat what can fundamentally change our collective lives is why we are here. We told people that crypto was a viable means for them to acquire wealth quickly without having a healthy mental base to support our own rhetoric. And if we are talking to the majority of folks, regardless of race or gender we are now delving into class and our somewhat impoverished (regardless of what side of the classroom you sit) relationship with money and capital gain.

Until we place a measurable value on solving societal problems with new tech and empowering people outside of old-boy capitalism there is no revolution to see here.