Two weeks ago, I spoke at a crypto event for the first time in ages. I was nervous af, but apparently this did not impact the delivery as many people walked up to me sharing positive feedback.
As a writer, I figured, while the recording isn't out in the open yet, I might as well try to write down the gist of it 😏
Initially, when I was nudged to submit a talk, the title I gave it was "Marx for Crypto Bros." I'd been called a Marxist by crypto people before, because I dared to question the individualistic, greed-driven mindset. Upon closer inspection I realized, none of these people ever read Marx, at best their takes were "well Lenin's implementation didn't work so that's all you need to know."
And if we know one thing, it's that leftish thought is the most disdained in crypto; which is funny when we have sexists, fascists, and obnoxious AI peddlers.
While there are entire talks to be done on what parts of Marx's writing make it conducive to dictators sacrificing present generations to a bigger cause, that's not what I spoke about. Instead, after being told I'm in the app track, I went back to reading some Marx and figuring out how that's relevant to apps.
My exposure until then had been primarily in the realm of a critique of Capitalism... I quickly realized there was more to it than that. A concept that perfectly described much of how I felt about crypto:
Do you ever feel like just a cog in the crypto machine? If so, I think that's by design, and by the culture we've built.
It's easy to feel like the main character of Tokyo Ghoul, all you wanted was to go on a date (make life-changing wealth), but instead, you got turned into a Ghoul (airdrop farmer), utterly dependent on external factors to provide you with meaning, or a sense of direction (or turn you into an even worse monster if you read Tokyo Ghoul re you know).
It's hilarious (not) how we, as a supposedly contrarian industry to Big Tech, have adopted much the same playbook. Think of the advice you're given when scaling your app. It's rarely go talk to your users and figure out what it is they seek.. It's more often, you should add the following to your thing:
frictionless: you don't want people to stop and think, the ideal user is a mindless cog giving you money
automation: as you wouldn't want to limit yourself to the times humans are awake. Anyway, it contributes to the previous point
gamification: everything that can be measured can and will be gamified, you might as well lean into that and make sure people come back. It's worked for pigeons, when they provided predictable rewards, the birds would eventually stop trying, but with unpredictable rewards they continued...
incentives: because if there's no actual good reason beyond that, and if we view a human as a purely "optimize for gains"-driven being, might as well slap those potential tokens on there. Plus, creating it is free.
The main goal of these things? Growth... and that's best achieved through? Addiction. Then you won't have to worry about users coming back. This might just work short-term, but what's crypto if not an industry running on short-termism?
"Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. "
Byung-Chul Han
Imagine you're hooked to such an app. Actually, you don't even have to imagine. I bet you have at least one semi-addiction to one of the social media platforms of your choosing, where.. You find yourself going back to it, scrolling on despite a lack of actual joy derived from it. A sense of not being in control often accompanying that binge.
I'd assume that Sysiphus if asked whether he'd prefer the boulder or doomscrolling, he'd chose the first.
And we know what's driven this model in Big Tech: Capital.
There's no crypto exceptionalism. Similar tendencies are playing out right before our eyes, think about all the vaporware L1s that the VC cabal is pushing down our throats.
And yet, the second you try to point this out, you're a Marxist. So let's talk about Marx, the guy so obsessed with economic conditions as what's holding his contemporaries; mind you not him because he was bourgeoisie and had a sugar daddy; down.
Especially when reading his Economic and Philosophical Manuscript, one theme stood out. It wasn't a critique purely of the distribution of capital. It was what it did to people, especially the factory workers working under gruesome conditions, stripped of their dignity and intellect.
Now thinking about it, not so different from an Amazon warehouse worker, but we all love our convenience, so we push this aside.
The result is alienation. It's worth noting that Marx believed humans to have an inborn desire to create, to labor, to shape the world around us, and create tokens of our existence. That's why people will continue creating art even if they're not paid for it (I know this is really hard to understand for some capitalist tech bro who believes that humans are just machines)
By stripping men of the time, the energy to follow this calling and instead creating such dumbed down labor that anyone could learn the steps in week, Capitalism didn't just alienate these workers from their own human essence, it also alienated them from each other; since everyone was now a competitor, fighting the threat of being replaced; and from the environment which was now abundant with things created by men but in which none of them were really expressed.
Quite depressing.
He'd describe such men as a crippled monstrosity, enslaved by things and circumstances.
Ironically a diagnosis that aptly applies to our day and age. It's just that the ones who are most alienated aren't the workers using their hands to work anymore, it's people like us. The Tech workers...
And we do our fair share to contribute and accelerate that sense of estrangement.
It's easy blaming the VCs, but that's letting ourselves off the hook. I believe there's largely three kinds of alineation in crypto. Of course, that's on top of the usual alienation we suffer in modernity ^^
Alienation from our values
Remember when this industry stood for something that wasn't trying to rug the others faster than they can rug me? When the main goal wasn't to grow the fastest, to raise the most money, or to hit untenable numbers of users within a week of launch?
It seems that we've lost touch with what made this industry special. It just takes a look at Bitcoin to understand what I mean. It started as a decentralized network that everyone could participate in. Now it's more like a currency that companies buy into when they need PR coverage, and as more BTC accumulates in the hands of the few... we stand and clap?!
It used to be about empowering, now we just empower people to launch shittier memecoins, or get hooked to yet another app. What happened to banking the unbanked?
Zora is another great example of how things can go wrong. The noble initial pursuit of creating a positive-sum ecosystem turned on its head.
Alienated from each other
In crypto, we often reduce people to wallets, which makes it easy to forget there are real humans behind them with real stories. It also paves the way to not treat them as equals. Adding further abstraction usually contributes to alienation.
One appalling example to how we forget or have turned each other into means to an end (the end of making money), was the debate of two crypto bros on CT on whether they should tokenize a screenshot they'd taken messaging a girl on Hinge on Zora or pump.fun.
It took an insane amount of time until it was pointed out in the comments that this was gross disregard for the lady's privacy. It hadn't even crossed any of the people's minds in their excitement over potential gains.
It also took Zora one entire day to eventually take down the image... you do your own thinking there.
Alienation from our own humanity
There's a certain crop of crypto and tech bro that's really depressing to spend time with. It's because they seem to have very little regard for the things that make life worth living. Their deeply rationalist approach to life, ruling out any supposed irrational behavior like.. learning for the fun of it, not for gains... everything always has to be optimized for efficiency.
It's as if they're alienated from their own humanity, out of touch with makes us human, all these things at best considered inefficiencies or flaws. Crypto's recent focus on PVP doesn't help, disregarding the fact that our species has a track record of collaboration, creating a hostile environment where any empathy is considered weak, solidarity naive.
Maybe people have just become numb, apparently, such is the effect of too much time in the dopamine economy, and crypto is a hellscape for rewiring those circles. Dead inside.
..."how can I be virtuous if I am not alive, and how can I have a good conscience if I am not aware of anything?"
Marx
Is this really how humans should spend their time? Trapped in toxic environments? In communities only bound by the joint desire of making it because the system is rigged? A dog-eat-dog world as imagined by Hobbes?
The biggest problem is that, as long as this is the only viable path we present, it's the one people imagine. The one that's looked up to and tried to be followed. If you can make it and disappear with complete disregard for morals, then why shouldn't you? (given you have no conscience ofc)
As long as we don't start speaking up against such practices, very little will change. As such, the problem is political as much as it's systemic, and I know tech lovers hate to read things like that. Not every problem can be fixed by tech.
That said, since my talk was in the app track, I concluded with a few ideas for people building with a more humanist mindset:
Don't enslave people to your freedom tech. If it can only survive when everyone has to check five times a day, maybe it's not all that great. I'm just saying, it's worth a thought, and enslavement to freedom hasn't worked in AOT, why would it work here?
Create a true antithesis to the walled gardens of Big Tech: empower in the true sense, not in the way that current capitalism does by selling us shit. Instead, give people agency and tools to shape the environments they're in online. You'd think that blockchain is perfect for more participatory, diverse modes.
Listen, respect, and protect your users and their dignity. I know many might not be ready in crypto to start talking about dignity, but I think we should. Especially if we want to be more attractive to real humans, and to create an antithesis to what most of the internet has turned into.
"To be radical is to go to the root, and the root is man himself."
Marx
If being a humanist in this hyper-capital enamored crypto sphere is what gets me called a Marxist, I'm okay with that label.
And I've learned to not start fights with people who don't have the curiosity to actually read up on the thinkers whose names they throw around as insults.
Thanks to the people who listened to me irl, and thanks to anyone reading 💚
Excuse any typos, it's Friday eve and I wanted to get it down before I lose the motivation ha.
Once the recording is available, I'll link it here as well.
So long,
don't forget to log off occasionally.
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appreciate this, thanks for writing. marx though capitalism would crash, but what if it evolves into postcapitalism. What if crypto still has promise for an automated world where captialism has mutated. Keep writing.
Fromm argues that Marx was simply writing his works a century too early; others like Yanis Varoufakis argue what we got isn't capitalism anymore but feudalism. One can't help but wonder if that's true considering the amount of power concentrated in very few companies that don't even try to offer a great product to people anymore (like Google) but just max extract..
GE, Decided today was a good day to finally write down a gist of the talk I gave at ETH Ireland (while the recording is still not out :))
great read.