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Web3 practitioners often portray their own activity as taking part in, and contributing to, a post-political order, stemming from a wholly non-ideological drive. In our interviews, it’s notable that there was scant mention of contributing to existing public initiatives (in fields such as healthcare, education, social welfare, cultural heritage, or even technology and innovation). A majority of our interviewees declared that they did not engage in State run elections or affiliate with existing political parties, workers unions, etc. A handful of the respondents identified as sympathisers of moderate centrist forces (such as the ‘pragmatic’ Italian party Azione) and two declared themselves members of the Libertarian Party. Although Tim Corballis and Max Soar write of digital organisations (such as DAOs) offering “an automated, market-based alternative to the party” and originating “from a genuine social need for popular sovereignty otherwise unresolved” (Corballis & Soar, 2022: 8) one common response to questions of political orientation is illustrated by this comment by a Web3 promotional agent:

“I’m nowhere there (laughter), like I feel it’s so I feel it’s so far from my life right now. (…) I don’t feel personally attached to [any political current] because I think everyone is doing a bad job at it. So, yeah, I mean, we just need to help people live better, take care of the planet, and that’s it. Whatever side you’re on, it's like we have one world, and if we don't focus on improving it, we're going to be in a bad position. All of us. Left, right, centre, extremists, whatever.” (i56)

The same respondent declared that after her experience of financial crisis in a Latin American country, Web3 had appeared as “a marvellous way to kind of live”; “I was doing something that I cared about, I was getting paid in this new technology, so it kind of kept me, and until today, it just keeps you actively learning and being more curious and more self-sovereign, just being more independent in general (...).” Beyond the notable conflation of this new technology keeping her both financially afloat and intellectually stimulated, it’s important to consider the reference to self-sovereignty, rather than any form of politics. A Switzerland based Web3 ‘builder’ gave a very similar response to the question of his political positioning: “My purpose is to empower people, you know, to empower people with knowledge, empower people so that they can have, like, more decisions, so that they have, like, more sovereignty, you know, in their decisions.” (i50)

Those who do evoke political beliefs and motives generally express them in vague and muddled forms – from the outset highlighting their rejection of Bitcoin maximalism (only one of our interviewees identified as such) and with surprisingly few acknowledgements of agorism, transhumanism or even accelerationism. Firstly, we encountered somewhat listless echoes of libertarian inspired, anti-system ‘praxis’ – more seldomly represented as adhering to a ‘contrarian’ mindset – which included the predictable rejection of public entities and regulation, mainstream media, central banks (and of course the abhorred prospect of CBDCs). Yet despite sympathising with this cause, the majority of our respondents insisted on their profoundly pragmatic stance, as the following two interview extracts illustrate, firstly the founder of a Web3 gaming platform, secondly the founder of a blockchain-enabled machine learning service. Assuredly, the practicalities of designing financially lucrative products takes precedence over ‘ideological’ considerations:

“I am familiar with what you’re (…) mentioning, I know the roots of all of this stuff. And there’s even people inside this space who have similar kinds of mindsets and have that kind of ideology. I would say for me personally, from the company, it’s a little bit boring, but we don’t we don’t go that far back and we don’t have that kind of same kind of mindset or mentality. For us, really using this technology is a way for us to achieve the goals that we set out, which is creating fun, enjoyable experiences for the players, enhancing the features of the games. (i14)

“I’m interested in [the libertarian origins of blockchain]. I can relate to some of those positions, although I’m not... I’m practical and pragmatic, I would say. I think, decentralization in and of itself, or like some intense, level of privacy absent a discussion around like, context is kind of pointless. And so I think it’s really important to not lose, sight of, like, the practicalities of certain products.” (i53)

Secondly, a handful of our respondents professed their interest for what one has coined ‘blockchain radicalism’ (Dávila, 2023) – and clearly had some knowledge of the commons-inspired theoretical proposals of a Primavera De Filippi. Here, the discourse of community-based, financial democratisation was even explicitly related to a ‘techno-socialist’ perspective; according to the founder of a Web3 writing platform, humanity appears to be (more or less consciously) ripe for an egalitarian politics afforded by blockchain technology:

“I actually believe that we’re sort of being called as humanity to evolve, ourselves, in our sort of social, relational capacities in order to work in these systems, and that a lot of leftist, socialist or communist ideology was just very early. We weren’t sort of ready for... developmentally ready for those systems to function. And we’re now sort of evolving into those possibilities for ourselves and doing that in unison with infrastructure and technology that makes those possibilities feasible, in terms of trustless blockchain systems, AI agents that are collectively trained, etc. and I think this is very clearly coming together to create organizational systems that are more collectively intelligent and more representative of the truths, needs and desires of the people that they represent. And that’s the sort of utopian possibility that fires me and so many of my contemporaries.” (i37)

Thirdly, ostensible political expressions came in the form of endorsements of various identity causes (tolerance and inclusion of minority groups), consensual advocacy (human rights, democracy, development, aid for migrant populations) and ongoing Western-led crusades (pro-Ukraine, against the ‘totalitarian’ Chinese regime). One issue where the interviewees proffered the most convoluted political statements was that of environmental protection and the struggle against climate change. This came in the form of frequent comparisons to the environmental cost of regular monetary bank transactions such as VISA, references to voluntary consumer CO2 offset payments and the supposed ecological neutrality reached in blockchain mining (thanks to a mix of proof of stake, heating Montreal churches, the usage of purportedly ‘green’ protocols, and using the electricity produced by the heat of El Salvador volcanoes). One particularly comical response was voiced by the co-founder of an Italian Web3 data brokerage platform:

“We create lots of information about Cosmos and the possibility to create the new activities with this blockchain because it’s carbon neutral. Yeah, we try to involve much more people to do this, this responsibility choice. And we as, as company, we don’t print, we just go around with an electrical car (…) so it is a sort of revolution, you can consider this a sort of revolution, but it’s not about the political movement, it’s just mentality of freedom.” (i41)

Whether or not they see themselves seeking alternatives to the present system, practising a form of politics through the further extension of Web3 practices, one common defining characteristic of their beliefs is that the technology of blockchain itself is inherently revolutionary – as a New York based product manager for a Web3 software development platform summed it up: “AI has taken the spotlight, but blockchain remains the true game changer of our time.” (i32) Yet, the recurrent affirmation of pragmatic techno-solutionism and its corollary denial of ideological doings hold little sway, if one pauses for just a moment to consider how blockchain technology is intrinsically marked by a drive for absolute quantification and commodification of reality – and beyond. See how Web3 players actually describe their productive activity in this regard.

Even the most seemingly ‘progressive’ projects encountered fully adopt the language and implement the practices of financialisation. The founder of a New York based music distribution service – championing both the cause of cultural diversity and of decentralised governance – spoke of “this idea that you can buy from an independent artist before they’ve blown out and then maybe five or ten years down the line, when their career has really taken off, that piece is a lot more valuable.” (i28) Even the somewhat more experienced founder of a Web3 deliberative platform – however concerned with solving the issue of self-governance, and aware that “it's really hard for most young people to understand problems of that nature” – included in his prototype “a gamification process to incentivize people to behave in a civil way and in a contributory way into the deliberation” allowing users to “earn [name of token] doing a bunch of stuff, (...) being a good citizen, broadly speaking.” (i54). The obligatory tokenisation of Web3 applications may take on the appearance of an epiphany, but it remains essentially a further step in the systematisation of commodity exchange over the qualitative nature of usage – as we observe with the musings of this Switzerland based entrepreneur: “I asked myself if as a consumer, (...) what would be a better alternative to listening to music for free? And the answer I gave myself was: way better than having it for free is to receive money.” (i51) The New York based entrepreneur, aforementioned earlier for his reflections on the beginnings of the www and its ‘original sin’ eagerly explained how the vision for his current content monetisation platform came from the realisation “that the payment part is just one part, but (...) the idea of encoding economic incentives was maybe even stronger.” (i29). Whatever his historical interest in the beginnings of the Internet and transactions in the protocol stack, he fails to imagine a web that might not be financially quantified. This more or less conscious, and more or less fervent, belief in the infinite extension of commodity form appears as one of the core components of Web3 discourse:

“I think in an ideal world one day, everything we touch, in a few clicks, we’ll know who is the owner of that, because blockchain can say who owns what. It’s a huge ledger, a bookkeeping mechanism that says: ‘You have spent money and you have earned money, and this is how the ownership is organized.’ (…) I think that in 50 years from now, everything will be an investment opportunity, because when blockchain really is implemented you’ll always know who owns what and you’ll want to be the owner, the fractional owner of something. (…) The concept of ownership and fractional ownership will be much more ingrained in our everyday lives.” (i51).

This view is of course disseminated by futurist Parag Khanna and investor cum ‘theorist’ Balaji Srinivasan, who offer us this dystopian glimpse of future life under Web3: “Every asset will be traded against every other asset in a gigantic table we call the ‘defi matrix’ (…). Everyone becomes a foreign-exchange trader, all the time (…).” (Khanna & Srinivasan, 2021). Moreover, let’s not forget commodification of the “unreal world’, as we see from this declaration by the founder of a Web3 metaverse monetization platform: “[Name of company] is able to retrieve all existing data from the blockchain, which are related to the trading of the digital lands. So we can create any kind of market analysis, any kind of, predictive model, any kind of, report, that can be used in order to see how the market is going to see which are the current prices for digital land for a specific platform or which are the trending platforms.” (i39).

These findings may be all the more striking as the majority of the Web3 players interviewed were not primarily involved in de-fi or in crypto per se, but in ‘building’ projects on top of layer 1 blockchains. This is precisely the innovation brought upon with the advent of the Ethereum protocol and its Turing-completeness, as Brody and Couture remind us, referring here to Patrice Flichy’s use of the notion of ‘mask ideology’:

“Rather than viewing the world computer imaginary and imaginaries related to finance and currency in opposition, it might be better to comprehend them as mutually reinforcing. In terms of design, this appears quite clearly in the way Ether, as a currency, is used as a ‘gas’ to fuel the Ethereum as a world computer, which in turn reinforces the value and stability of the currency itself. In terms of ideology, the world computer ideal and related discourses of inclusive building and experimentation function as a ‘mask ideology’ (…) The characterization of Ethereum as a world computer is mobilized to enroll actors more inclined toward the building aspect of Ethereum, while at the same time “masking” the fact that Ethereum seems to be still foremost used as a financialization tool.” (Brody, Couture, 2021: 557).