On Tuesday, July 27th, at 17:00 CET, the HR person in five words pulled the stable foundation away beneath my feet.
After nearly two years of working alongside them, I was quickly reduced to a human resource, measured in the cost that could be saved by getting rid of it, as quickly as possible — presumably to make shareholders happy and not stir emotions in current team members — with the least human touch.
Of course, those who made the decisions would hide behind HR, none of them offering constructive feedback, it's just a "fresh start" and that's that. Fair enough, on an Excel spreadsheet, their calculation sure made sense. Plus, it's always better to do something than to do nothing... well.
Suffice it to say, the entire thing was handled in such an undignified, cruel way, I was well-incentivized to want to burn bridges. Their luck is that I am not the person to hold a grudge because that's bad for my zen and, as we all know, the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference :))
There's an irony in a humanist getting dehumanizing treatment. At the same time, that's just business as usual in corporate.
Any success or impact that cannot be broken down into raw data points might as well not exist.
They've convinced us that peak self-optimization consists of capturing everything about yourself, from the step count to heartbeat to the number of pages you read, and then feeding it to an AI so you can talk to it about your own progress.
Why listen to yourself when you can maximize the self-alienation by asking a machine instead how you're doing based on seemingly objective data points?
They'll brag about how many books they read, but never go into which one left a mark.
They'll show you how much their follower count has increased since pivoting to the latest hype thing, but have no idea how many existing community members and customers they are on the verge of losing by betraying the initial mission they set out to achieve.
They'll remain blissfully unaware of the parts of reputation not showing in likes, shares, and engagement in their Telegram group.
Let's be real for a second, not all projects need a huge community, especially not if your idea of community is: throwing together customers, investors, and contributors in one chat that's then spammed with gms or semi-abusive comments the second the price goes down.
The conversations I've partaken in normally start with:
"We need to build a community. A tribe. Something like the Chainlink Army."
The why is rarely considered; it's just a must-do. And if one must do it, one might as well have ludicrous growth aspirations, completely neglecting how communities grow organically around shared values, love for the same cultural artifact, or a shared worldview.
It's always about growth, never about maintenance.
Easy come, easy go. Where will the Galxe campaign joiners be when the rewards dry up? Probably not in your Telegram chat.
Chances are, by playing that game, you shot yourself in the foot because no one will now consider anything happening on your feed or groups to be authentic engagement to begin with, when it has once been so obviously faked.
In many ways, these crypto communities aren't far away from the "communities" big brands are grooming, which are really just a bunch of consumers classed together by their favorite choice of logo to wrap themselves in.
Here's the big difference with real communities and those of corporate consumers cosplaying as such (and many crypto communities): a sense of obligation.
Where that comes from, I can't say. I assume it's deeply rooted in the human desire to connect, and be part of something bigger than oneself.
Consumers in a collective don't owe each other anything. The bonds that form the community are transactional; the only commitment is to pay the company for the privilege of wearing their logo. In some instances, buying into such a community comes with quasi-religious aspects in fetishizing the aesthetic, or a tendency to make being a "glossier girl" or a "lululemon wearer" one's whole personality.
It's just sparkling commodity fetishism y'all.
Specific crypto communities are not much different, except less aesthetically pleasing on the eye in most cases.
Yet. what bothers me is whenver projects say they need to build "communities" real quick, to appeal to investors, or to CEXs so that their token might get listed. The most important feature of such communities in their understanding is: it being huuuge and and becoming ever-more so. Growing forever, as only cancer can do.
This obsession with growth is intricately tied to our obsession with and inability to look beyond the numbers.
It doesn't help that many typical workers in crypto come from tech, finance, and management backgrounds, where efficiency and profit maximization are the primary goals. Ethics and morals are weaknesses, and ideally, humans would become more, not less, predictable.
Value becomes price. What doesn't have a value not expressed in price is worthless. Emotions? Meanings? Don't compute to raw data, can't be put onchain to be valued.
The idea of turning it all into "hard" science, seemingly objective, is hardly new. If we had more students of history in the space, we'd have realized that this is merely extending the cult of reason from the Enlightenment era to fit our own.
“Reason is the ultimate language of madness.”
Foucault
To label this ideology, I came up with the term Crypto Positivism for my Dappcon talk, poking fun at the audience for not recognizing Comte. An effect one can easily achieve using any other 18th-century philosopher.
That's because the lion does not concern himself with the fields not directly providing utility to his cause in crypto. We repeat mistakes others made because of our unwillingness to study what came before, and a dash of arrogance.
"Whoever aspires to create a new social or political reality must before all concern himself to ensure that these humble commonplaces of historical experience will be invalidated by the situation he brings into being."
Ortega
How many network state fan bois have you seen discuss the lessons from the village modelled after Skinner's Walden 2 or the garden of Epicurus? I'd guess: zero.
Let's take a step back in history and talk a little about Comte, because his trajectory doesn't seem all that foreign to the modern observer.
Comte is quite important in philosophy and sociology, yet lesser known due to a quirk of his personality. Mainly that he was, what kids nowadays call, delulu.
Living in a time where sciences increasingly demystified the world, following the chaos of the Enlightenment, he aimed to unify all the sciences under one method: the positive.
The positive method is intuitive for us; everyone who believes that data holds the key to truth already is a bit of a positivist. It establishes that we should let go of all the metaphysical nonsense and focus purely on what can be directly experienced, measured, and seen.
"What you capture is all there is."
Comte theorized that all sciences would eventually reach a stage where everything is quantified, after passing through a theological and a metaphysical stage. He thought, similar to how many of the current AI oligarchs do, that science could serve an integral function in society—the "abundance promise" of his time.
Ironically, he lost faith in that idea toward the end of his life, and instead claimed that what we really needed was a new religion, one with himself as the "High Priest of Humanity."
To us, people in the 21st century that doesn't sound so crazy when we have the likes of Sam Altman saying things like the most powerful men build religions" or like Elon Musk casting themselves in the role of savior of humanity - oblivious to the undignified conditions he put workers in his factories, or women who served in satisfying his breeder fetish... guess they don't count as humanity.
The best way to de-humanize anyone, is to turn them into a number. Rob them of a name and story, take their dignity, measure them by a handful of data points, and that's that.
In many ways, that's the alienating treatment we give people in crypto - be that by turning each of their posts into tokens, or reducing interactions to transactions.
Crypto positivism is the ideology of quantifying everything - for the sake of it - and often, because, I suspect, some of these people have already lost touch with their own humanity. All they can appreciate now is: numbers go up.
Confront them with the concept of intrinsic motivation, and the risk of crowding it out by throwing money at people, and they'll look at you as if you've gone a bit crazy. Ask them whether they ever talked to a community member about how they enjoyed their experience in this group, and they'll be flabbergasted.
What they can tell you straight up is the growth rate, the token price, and the total value locked. The amount of followers, the engagement, and how many people tuned in for a live stream.
What they can't say is, did anyone on there actually learn something? Felt compelled to dig deeper? Or hated it?
Anything that doesn’t conform to their idea of computation and reason is simply suspect, invalid. It’s this obsession with measuring everything as such that enticed Adorno and Horkheimer to criticize the Enlightenment as totalitarian.
“Today, we no longer have any narratives that provide meaning and orientation for our lives. Narratives crumble and decay into information.”
Byung-Chul Han
The result of a total belief in numbers is that there’s no other success than numbers going up. There’s no place where a project can say, well, we accomplished what we wanted, when there’s always the expectation to continue growing because that’s really all there is.
Then you have those who recognize that modern man is experiencing a meaning crisis, and in trying to fill this void, they sell us their grand visions and the opportunity to be part of them. All it takes is buying the token and yapping about it. We’ll give you purpose as long as you give us your attention.
A great deal, in many cases, what’s sold isn’t as much purpose as the dream of financial freedom through early investment in this coin. That’s all fun and games, yet it does not create meaning.
Money is just a means. The myth of financial wealth through crypto so pervasive because we live in a society where, unfortunately, there’s a select few able to do, pretty much whatever the f*ck they want and getting away with it.. and instead of us deciding to band together, the best we can think of is, wanting to join them.
For saying such things, I’ve often been labelled socialist or Marxist, but hey, since I’ll never ditch that label, might as well roll with it. At least they were preaching solidarity, and that is indeed something that does provide humans with some meaning.
As Vernake rightly diagnosed, the meaning crisis has little to do with numbers — you won’t fix it by hitting your stated 100,000 followers goal on X — and a lot to do with other humans. It’s more often about going beyond our own utility-maximizing selves.
In his essay Culture, Terry Eagleton writes that it’s quite remarkable how many of the most valuable human activities are also the most useless. Or to pick a reference that’s more popculturally spread
It would appear this truth has often been forgotten, swept under the carpet in pursuit of bigger better numbers. Yet might that not be the reason why a lot of sensible souls are starting to feel it’s all too shallow, it’s all just business, no one is your friend, everyone is just out to get each other’s liquidity?
Is it surprising that we’ve alienated artists by turning their works into yet another commodity thrown under the bus of speculation in pursuit of trading volume? Then we turn back and wonder why there’s so much ugliness.
The lack of beauty in crypto sure warrants a whole other essay — and after I studied Hildebrand’s Aesthetics, I’ll get to it — but it's just another symptom of the fetish of quantification.
It’s what makes it so hard to argue against doing morally questionable things, because the language to do so simply does not stick. Kant’s conscience in many has given way to Locke’s wolf.
Arguing that something is simply wrong, because you wouldn’t do it if you cared for the people you supposedly work for, rarely works. Care just isn’t big enough of a concept because, after all, it cannot be turned into a number.
What does history tell us about positivism? Well, it was hugely popular in Vienna circles until the logical positivists realized their fallacy: that all verifiability criteria were always provided by the social context and era in which they lived.
There never was a clear-cut differentiation between our subjectivity and objective reality. Even seemingly objective data can and will lie. Ask a logical positivist for their moral philosophy and what you get is a vacuum.
In a way, Sigmund Freud was one of the first to try to break from that, and marry it instead with the subconscious, the subjective, the inner worlds that can never be directly observed.
There are lessons in there. The discontents he found in his society aren’t all that different from the ones we live under in crypto. Weren’t we supposed to position against the extraction, the dehumanization practiced by Big Tech?
Don’t let the business school mindset take over.
It’s worth acknowledging the perils of quantifying everything. It might pave the way to a more humane, less desensitizing, and less rage-bait-driven environment.
It doesn’t always have to be world domination. A community doesn’t need millions of members to be a success. Growth doesn’t have to continue forever.
That’s if we dare to explore different ways, breaking from the positivism, and get back to acknowledging that in the end, we’re still dealing with humans, with all the messiness and beauty that brings with it.
Thanks for reading 💚
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I'm sorry you got laid off. I went through the same thing a few months ago. I've adopted deontology and contractualism as my guiding ethical systems. Your sentence, "Arguing that something is simply wrong, because you wouldn’t do it if you cared for the people you supposedly work for..." is right in line with where I center myself. We must be able to reasonably justify our actions, and the means must be just--the end doesn't justify the means. That's pretty antithetical to many businesses, but less so to individuals. Individuals in a business will still experience hurt and hope. I don't know why it's so hard to get individuals to throw off the burden of "this is how it's done" and make their businesses treat people the same way they want to be treated. But the pursuit of that strikes me as worthy.
P.S. I can't add paragraph breaks on paragraph which is nuts.