Recently, I've been growing increasingly angry and frustrated with "the system".

As a freelancer with medium income, I'm getting milked by the financial authorities via taxes, and have a big social contributions burden. 40 - 50% of my salary are easily spent on this.

At the same time, since it's always based on last year's income, even if I don't have any income for a few months this year, I still have to pre-pay the same amount every quarter - if lucky, I get what I overpaid back in 6 months, if not, much later.

There's zero flexibility in this. No acknowledgment of fluctuating income situations or the human behind. The typical bureaucratic monster from Kafka novels, the great scam of capitalism that it’d rid us of such bureaucracy. It’s just created this labyrinth of procedures where humans don’t matter. Only numbers do.

I wouldn’t mind paying taxes this much if there were at least a little more flexibility in payment schedules/acknowledgment of income fluctuations, and more influence on how they’d be used…More participatory democracy, and not those on the top deciding stuff for people in situations they’ve not even got the decency to try and empathize with.

You look to politicians who tell you to "work harder" and that the fight for fairness is between the "have-nots" and those "having even less" - squarely avoiding the topic of the inequality between the rich and the rest.

Fairness to them is pitting those at the bottom against those still clinging to the cliff. Like the rabbits in the Aesop fable, who lived in fear and therefore decided to commit suicide, only to realize that, as they approached the lake, there were frogs in fear of them.

This gave them the spirit to continue living—a familiar trope: finding someone even lower to kick down on to feel a bit better yourself. Although this might not last for long because, in the end, all we want is recognition and a sense of having an impact on the conditions we live under.

I used to think that maybe crypto would be the place for enabling such things. I don't feel so anymore. All we seem to do is drive the dehumanization, losing sight of the people behind the wallets, probably why AI agents became such a compelling thing, the prospect of never dealing with humans again… This tech bro idea that humans just present unnecessary friction for the fluid functioning… Feelings not to be considered because, one can’t measure them.

“the idea that we need to overcome failings of humanness by becoming objective, every thing created fairly, equally… It’s getting rid of passion, of all the things we’re told are primitive and it scares me.”

Terry Gilliam

Sure, some projects don't do it...

However, generally speaking, crypto focuses largely on individuals who are already doing well for themselves and are secure enough, rather than on the majority of people living paycheck to paycheck under precarious economic conditions. That’s people who live in fear… not of missing out, of the next letter from the financial authority, of an unexpected bigger expense, of loss of their livelihoods..

We don’t seem to have grasped this concept at all, considering that our best idea now is to say that “low-risk DeFi” is all that is needed to onboard the masses.

Do you really think those 4% over a year on the $200 they can spare means anything at all?!

It's a drip on a hot stone when inflation easily outpaces that. It's again an offer most attractive to people with a lot of spare cash.

If you're desperate, you'll be more enticed to gamble.

Even I feel the allure of it, the idea that, hey imagine if I turned this $200 into $20,000. I could pay off student debt, and for once have some breathing room, not fear the next letter from the financial authority or a health incident. Such amounts, if you go by CT, are a joke.

They’re not for the grand majority of humans living on earth.

So I have all this anger and frustration, but nowhere to take it.

Crypto has squarely failed to provide a compelling vision for actual human empowerment to me. Its political mission seems largely an attempt to escape politics altogether by turning each interaction into a transaction, the only visible ideology: money, the benevolent dictator: the smart contracts ’ unforgiving rule.

I’m still doing my little talks, trying to get at least a few people to care, although, it of course is always hard to explain to someone why they ought to care about more than just number go up once they’ve become so estranged from themselves, they don’t even know who they are outside of a personal brand & job.

Why care about other people? Why about the material conditions shaping all our lives? Why should crypto deal with it when a few of us could make a shit ton of money instead by onboarding BlackRock? Why care about experimenting with non-financial apps when everything is money?

I can’t give a logical argument. If the cost of what we do is morality, and utopia for the few at the cost of dystopia for the rest, I don't want it.

I feel that as an industry, we’re failing to live up to what we could be. We’re treading the path prepared by TradFi, risking becoming just another sector of the behemoth we set out to slay. (Or at least be a shadow to). We’re also on a good path to further become alienated, and miserable, all in the service of what exactly?

In a world of rage-bait marketing, we should ask ourselves more often whether we aren't using our rage for the wrong things, vain arguments, cheap engagement farming when really... There are more fundamental things to be angry about. Much bigger, more significant things.

Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best I can do to try and shape my conditions is to become active locally, outside of crypto.

I just needed to get this out of my system.

Thanks for reading 💚