Life is not daijoubu
Are you ok babe? You've barely touched your human essence in years
That's how I feel quite a bit these days.
And it's not just because I'm forced to using Notion at work (that is enough of a pain honestly for one human) - it's also because I feel consistently like being the odd one out for trying to argue against de-humanizing ways, against ways to strip all dignity away, from winning the race to the bottom just for the sake of quick attention.
I know this doesn't go in a Tech Bro's bird brain (oh wait sorry... actually pigeon brains have double the neuron density than we do so it's an unfair comparison to the birds), but attention is not made equal. Neither are all your users.
I've always been deeply critical about this attempt to squeeze everything into data points. Even when individuals do it to themselves. There's a reason Yuval considered data-ism one of the most dangerous movements of our time, and Byung-Chul Han deems this cult of transparency to be a culprit of our eroding social fabric.
There really is no need to become your prison guard and prisoner at the same time.
There's also really no need why we should be so enamored with the idea of stripping people of everything that makes them human only so they can fit your "data capture".
I'm really amazed at how many times discussions around new product launches are less about what does it solve for the people you create it for ⸺ assuming those exists anyway ⸺ and all about how to design it so that more people will use it, to ensure it goes viral fast, and keeps em coming back.
It's as if all that matters is number go up.
Transaction count, wallets connected, volumes, followers, engagement... pick your poison.
There's no place for qualitative measure there ⸺ and maybe that's by design.
Because we're not dealing in such particulars, we're only dealing with the lowest common denominator.
If a game designed to addict will be the fastest way to grow users, let's do it.
Who cares as long as we accumulate wealth, status, or attention, right?
That all too often seems the leading motivation.
As long as we make money out of it, it doesn't matter whether others' dignity or humanity is denied in the process. Attention is all you need; how it's gained does not matter.
In the Pedagogy of the oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that to the oppressor, humanity is something that they exclusively possess, an inherited property; whereas the others don't have it, so it's okay to treat them without regard for it. (If that sounds an awful lot like fascism... yeah it does)
Just like when crypto bros were super excited about turning a screenshot of a woman on Hinge into a coin on Zora without her consent...
no way crypto bros are arguing about the original ownership of a screenshot of a woman from a dating app and which form factor between pump and zora is better for this instead of even for one second stopping to think about what an insane violation of privacy and consent that is
466
Move fast and break things
That's the name of the game. Hey, even if it's social norms you don't understand at all, who gives a sh*t , after all, you're not in crypto to fix things, you're here for the disruption and if it doesn't work you'll just abandon the thing, and run up the next quick pump and dump. Maintenance is an art lost on most.
The longer I'm in this space, the more I feel like people have really forgot what it means to be a human.
i’m sorry but if someone dies on stream and your first reaction is to tokenise it or ape in, there’s something deeply broken in this space. and maybe in you.
crypto loves to talk about freedom, community, and disruption. what exactly are we building here?
crypto loves to talk about freedom, community, and disruption. what exactly are we building here?
And maybe it's all in the system, sure. After all, in the 18th century, Kierkegaard noticed that in the present age, too much information leads to confusion, forcing people to adopt whatever opinion they deem as the most socially advantageous without asking themselves what they actually feel or think.
In crypto, there certainly is a similar thing happening with the mob mentality.
For the time that Base tried to meme into existence the "coin everything", the cabal that was already associated with it was all in on this idea.
Although it wasn't quite new, it's just pump.fun dressed up in a boomer attire.
Innovation is now just new ways to extract value while financializing anything that's not yet tradeable.
As Heidegger noted in The Question concerning Technology, technology just turns the world into a resource ready for exploitation.
This too includes our selves. Our attention. Our souls?
Can't be long until you can trade your own thoughts.
This then begs the question, though... what even is a thought that you can coin?
It's not a conversation these people are ready to have.
Because it requires a little deeper consideration of what constitutes ownership over a thought and of individuality.
I know this would happen because every time I bring up that privacy goes beyond the individual, the best response I can get is that "I should have the right to sell my data".
There's no stopping to ask... is it really just my data. Is it maybe also someone else's? If so, do I even have the right to sell it? Should anyone of us? Is this a moral question?
Bringing up morals at a crypto happy hour is the best way to be left alone.
I can't help but feel that many in crypto are very out of touch with other human beings and themselves.
That, too, isn't a new trend either.
"We shouldn't allow these glories to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of ourselves."
Nicholas Carr in Glass Cage
In 1867, long before crypo, Marx and Engels describe factory workers as "a crippled monstrosity" turned into such due to the power of capital.
By reducing the working class to cogs in the machine, easily replaceable, competing with each other, all in such a precarious situation, yet clinging on to the little they had, they couldn't see beyond the individual sphere to recognize the misery bestowed upon them and the power that would lie in their solidarity.
While during the time of Marx, the working class might have been the ones most hit by alienation, now it's all of us.
"Alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people."
Erich Fromm
Surely, you can't be watching this latest Zuckerberg video explaining that they'll fix the loneliness epidemic by creating AI companions and arguing against the fact that... these people are horribly out of touch.
This is what happens when you believe that humanity is reducible to binary data—you think of friendship through the lens of supply & demand, and don’t understand why everyone despises you.
Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.”
It might just be that they're a crippled monstrosity, alienated from their own essence.
From all the things that make them human. That makes a human life worth living.
When everything is subsumed by the force of Capital, of financialization, of being turned into a coin for quick gain, what genuine interactions are left?
If anything you do is commoditized, what even is the real you? Is anything authentic anymore?
Is it worth it?
Maybe some are too deeply entrenched in the spectacle to ever break free from the world of appearance, from the addiction to growth at all cost, numbed, distracted by distractions from distractions, that they can't even conceive of a world beyond this.
You know the ironic part is, wasn't crypto meant to be freedom tech?
Yet I see awfully little discussion on that.
Getting people to constantly engage for the sake of earning points or some other sort of reward with an opaque distribution mechanism—isn't that a kind of unfreedom you foster there?
I'm not saying there's no room for reward systems, I'm just saying that a lot of crypto seems to have adopted the limbic capitalism playbook, exploiting our human weaknesses to get people hooked.
We see each other as wallets, maybe as exit liquidity, pixels on the screen.
There's often very little appreciation of the fact that we're dealing with real human beings. Their livelihoods. Nuances. Shades of grey.
The layers of abstraction, the lack of imagination, reducing others to wallets, to numbers, to resources to extract from. Even oneself then becomes but that.
It's not a coincidence that there's a big overlap between admirers of don't die and crypto bros. After all, what's the former if not an attempt to control your own body, treating it like a machine, giving up your agency to a blueprint, and flattening the perception of you in the world to data points on screens? It's a deeply nihilistic endeavor, if you ask me.
Similar to the attempts of a crop of crypto people very into turning everything, and everyone, into a number, a mindless cog in their liquidity machine.
The problem is that, by crypto standards anyway, it works.
Leaning on Byung Chul-Han's description of hyperconnectivity masquerading as meaningful engagement... I'd argue we have hyperactivity masquerading as meaningful adoption.
But as long as we're not even ready to discuss the system that gave rise to this, and have a reckoning on the social layer, I doubt anything will change.
In this system of soul-sucking apps, I would suggest being radical.
Build to empower, to enable, to meet humans in their wholeness.
In short, be a humanist.
Thanks for reading 💚
I know not everyone in crypto is horrible, and I'm glad I met many of those, as hard as they are to come by. This isn't an individual issue; it's a systemic one.
Despite countless disappointments, I still have hope for this industry, and try to do my part to seed different ways.
Watch this space 👀
Cover image: Scene from Code Geass
Hit publish on that blog. https://paragraph.com/@cryptonao/essence
The whole piece hits hard and resonates with current reality plus reality distortions 💯 Hope more people feel this: “There really is no need to become your prison guard and prisoner at the same time.”
Great read, thank you. Reminded my previous life in academic research. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, it is in the everyday—through small, improvised acts—that we reclaim agency within systems designed to contain us. But in digital space, these tactical resistances are increasingly difficult. The platforms anticipate, absorb, and monetize even our subversions. Still, it's precisely in these moments—where we pause, resist, mis-use, or simply opt out—that we assert our humanity. Subversion may be harder, but it's more essential than ever.
confession: i hate the new Zora but i love @naomiii's writing do yourself a favour: https://paragraph.com/@cryptonao/essence
awww thank you <3
thanks for your writing! 🤍 always feels so refreshing to see you writing so honestly and wholeheartedly.
In the latest blog post, @naomiii critiques the dehumanizing nature of attention-driven tech culture. There's a growing concern over how metrics overshadow genuine values, reducing humans to mere data points in pursuit of profit. A call is made for a return to 'humanism' in tech design.