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The question however remains open as to what degree this project of absolute commodification can be equated with an explicit political agenda, as David Golumbia wrote in his Politics of Bitcoin, and indeed with the far-right politics that now dominates in many Western nations. Admittedly, one could argue that the slogans and beliefs advanced by Web3 agitators – small community ties, decentralisation and disruption, pragmatic technological solutionism – “incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right.” (Golumbia, 2016: 4). One might therefore ask how it is that these ‘values’ so swimmingly cohabit with blatant individualism, capitalism-longevity and commodity fetichism.

To briefly offer some answers to this question, I would suggest putting aside the preconceptions that equate some of these specific ideological ‘values’ with the right or with the left. These may well appear as contradictions for those who seek to reason dialectically, but an ideological mode of thinking precisely thrives on the juxtaposition of seemingly antagonistic ‘values’. The cultural forms (Garnham, 1979: 129) of Web3 matter insofar as they are effective at supporting, reinforcing even, existing material relations of production, justifying and intensifying false and mutilating socio-economic conditions. We must attempt to gain a clearer sense of how and whence these oppressive shifts are stirred into motion, where and when their advance lies in wait before further ruinous lurches, how they may be halted and overturned. Doing so we might grasp that the pragmatic and techno-solutionist assumptions of Web3 players are effectively apolitical in the sense that they serve to advance the project of a wholly market-based post-political order, the incarnation of a Hayekian dream. We might also recognise that the prolonging of capitalism¹, and its recent historical mutations, have been fuelled by seemingly progressive drives of disruption and decentralisation (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999: 203-274; Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2023a: 11-62), even when its ‘innovations’ can objectively be analysed as regressions to earlier forms of relations of material production. As for digital ‘communities’, their stubborn disregard for the broader social process of production (and their inability to envisage its socialisation) merely serve to reinforce the narcissistic, individualistic shortsightedness that passes for a ‘value’. This entanglement is tellingly summarised here, by the older entrepreneur with an interest in democratic governance:

“Everybody is talking about communities. In Web3, we’re trying to sort of have it both ways. You’re an individual, okay. With your tokens and your data and your wallet, and your privacy, your data. But then okay, how valuable is that truly, without the community? (Laughter) The answer is it’s not valuable, simply because we are humans. We are a social species, right? We need other people.” (i54)

There is nothing groundbreaking about this declaration, but it’s useful to recall that value is inherently contrastive and can only be effectively converted into reality – brought from the realm of abstraction into real social relations – in a public and wider social context (Graeber, 2001: 120). Web3 hoarders subtract money away from circulation and social exchange, establishing a secretive relationship with the sums of crypto. They conceal their wealth in wallets, operating anonymously online, but all their transactions are universally visible. Tokens are hidden to be seen, with flashy NFTs as prestigious cherries on the cake, tips of the iceberg of the individual’s own value. This, I would suggest, constitutes the unifying element – where “some observers have described (…) a ‘culture war’ between anarcho-capitalists, who see blockchain as a way to free money and markets from the state, and ‘crypto-communists’, who see blockchain as a way to empower democratic autonomy and cybernetic planning.” (Sadowski & Beegle, 2023: 5) Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State (2022) is one example of how the first of those two groups toys with the idea of seceding from dysfunctional Nation States in order to set up exclusive enclaves for the wealthy or technological elite. Although Joshua Dávila, also known as “The Blockchain Socialist” and law scholar Primaverra De Filippi use most of their time on an episode of Dávila’s podcast critiquing Srinavasan’s work, he begins by stating that “a lot of things are interesting about the idea [of network states], from a conceptual point of view”, while De Filippi stresses:

“We also want to extrapolate both from the people that agree and that disagree, extrapolate maybe something that everyone has in common (…). What is the thing that accommunates (sic) all these people? Is there an underlying principle that somehow Balaji is tapping into? (…) We want to make it clear that the Network State is only one out of many possible instances of this principle and (…) pave the way for other instances of this underlying concept.” (Dávila, De Filippi, 2023a)

In a subsequent edition of the podcast, she goes a little further:

“What is this kind of common denominator that is actually unifying all those things that are abiding by the same name of ‘the network state’ hyperstition. And I think therefore maybe we can try to delineate what is this hyperstition about. Because even though we constantly criticise Balaji (…) in fact we’re actually way more aligned than the majority of people. We’re actually part of the same hyperstition.” (Dávila, De Filippi, 2023b)

By hook or crook, the unity of the broad umbrella of Web3 prevails over its different chapels. We agree to disagree, as blockchain is anyhow the way forward, whatever the hiccups along the way – and there are indeed plenty of these for players themselves. For reasons linked to strong ‘ideological seductions’, risk-prone and predatory behaviour, Web3 is a battlefield of burnouts and addiction, depression and anxiety (Karatzogianni, Matthews & Vachet, forthcoming). In terms of their positioning within wider relations of production, we encounter a similar phenomenon to that analysed among ‘gig economy’ platform managers (Codagnone et al., 2018). Even the most successful of these actors are not in a socially dominating positions; they are evidently from the most privileged sections of the world’s population, but by Western standards they are not part of the higher bourgeoisie nor acquainted with key industrial, political or military players. Sociologically they appear to be part of the capitalist encadrement class² (Bihr, 1989), spreading the word among other members of their social group, indirectly contributing to the deterioration of labour conditions for the working class, yet with plenty of ‘collateral damage’ among their peers. One could argue that regular Web3 players constitute little more than useful idiots, for an oligarchy which ultimately relies on the defence of commodity, ownership and inequality – well before one delves further down the reactionary branches of Big Tech’s ideological directory tree.

¹: Recall how in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism 2010/1916, Lenin already spoke of parasitism and decay as its key characteristics.

²: See footnote 2 in the final chapter of the book for further explanation of Bihr's notion.