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Just counted my cash, 452 marks. No idea what I’ll do with all that money – the only things left to buy cost no more than a few pfennigs. I also have about a thousand in the bank, again because there’s nothing to buy. (When I opened that account, in the first year of the war, I was still thinking of saving for peacetime, maybe even taking a trip around the world. That was a long, long time ago.) Recently people have been running to the bank – assuming they can find one that’s still open – to withdraw their money. What for? If we go down, the mark goes with us. After all, money, at least paper money, is only a fiction and won’t have any value if the central bank collapses. Indifferent, I run my thumb over the wad of bills, which probably won’t be worth anything except as souvenirs, snapshots of a bygone era. I assume the victors will bring their own currency and let us have some. Or else they’ll print some kind of military scrip – unless they decide not to give us even that, and force us to work for just a helping of soup.

A Woman in Berlin, Marta Hillers, 1945

From talking to Butler about the other side of the transaction, I know that those transactional domestic intimacies are emotional minefields. Assistant takes this further. He thinks the rich suffer ‘total paranoia about people stealing stuff’: ‘If you've got loads of art, and amazing cutlery, and incredibly valuable stuff in your house, you want every single thing listed. You want to be able to say, “What was item 2289?” I know of houses where everything is indexed, absolutely everything is indexed.’ This often falls to security staff, who have time on their hands. ‘So these former Marines are wandering round saying, “Silver fork with embossed Royal Doulton, item 1742. Next.”’ Even then, wealthy employers may demand to see the ledger and the item in question. Even in its inner sanctum, money’s spoils must be safe-guarded from the supposedly predatory intentions of others. Paranoia and stress are the dark, emotional underside of wealth.

Serious Money, Caroline Knowles, 2022

What I’ve written in part one may offer an adequate introduction to the key forms of Web3 discourse, to readers of a left-leaning, French intellectual review (once translated into that language, of course). By the same token, I merrily write, it might do something similar – or more – for various other audiences. Meanwhile, the tech oligopoly’s reliable chatbots suggest that the readers of such a journal appreciate in-depth ideas and discussions on topics like philosophy, history, politics, and social issues, and like to think critically; I’m informed that readership would include university professors, researchers, and students engaged in critical and theoretical debates, particularly those related to historical materialism, social progress, and the intersection of science and ideology. Their rival from the People’s Republic of China adds that readers of this review would typically value rigorous theoretical analysis combined with engagement in political struggles. All this is fine, but first, let’s assume that according to the guidelines of this review, the text is too long, by about sixty percent. This is indeed a problem, given that the ‘article’ doesn’t even include a satisfactory definition of blockchain technology, nor address a conundrum such as: how might a reader comprehend that blockchain technology is intrinsically marked by a drive for absolute quantification and commodification of reality (and beyond), if she’s perhaps learned elsewhere that not all blockchains inherently produce tokens or cryptocurrencies? I’ll come back to such subtleties, rest assured. Consider now a second, perhaps more thorny problem; let’s say the text was commissioned for a special edition, or a dossier, titled “The world according to Elon Musk” or something like “The new reactionaries of Silicon Valley”. Ah, she exclaims with relief, now this surely accounts for the opening references to terrible Trump 2 and unsavoury Ulbricht, dodgy Doge and the peppering of Pepe the frog! Yet, she might well ask whether the ‘new’ oligarchy’s ambivalent endorsement of all things blockchain is actually consubstantial to Web3 discourse, especially as she reads that the official minter of the term chattered about “safeguarding the liberal world” (even if that was four long years ago).

One might further get the sense, from what I’ve written so far, that the ‘key forms’¹ in which the lived experiences and productive activities of Web3 players crystallise are generally somewhat detached from the themes affording Musk’s assessments of Nayib Bukele as “one of the great minds of our time” or Adolf Hitler as “a communist, socialist type” (to be fair, he merely shared this assertion with AfD leader Alice Weidel in a live discussion on X). And despite being 83% male, our sample of Web3 player interviews was indeed devoid of any reference to the benefits of aggression or masculine energy in business. Aren’t my blockchain agitators primarily obsessed with creating a new system, opening up this big space for people to experiment in governance, communication, and to coordinate without relying only on governments and corporations? I’m paraphrasing the figure cited by a majority of my interviewees as a key influence in their ‘conversion’ to Web3 – the venerable Vitalik Buterin (2022). I’ll argue that these benevolent wishes are best not taken too seriously; nor any less seriously than those diatribes clogging up the “reactionary branches of Big Tech’s ideological directory tree” – even if these last appear, at present, to hold more sway, in terms of (re)designing social forms (such as classist, racist or sexist political actions). I’ll suggest – at this point – that the key cultural forms generated and circulated among Web3 players mirror the ambiguity of ‘fortune cookie’ prophecies: “To fill your purse, fortify the tribe”; “Only by breaking all rules can you preserve what truly matters”; “No quarrel grows where skilled hands build and wise tongues speak measure”. I’ll take the time necessary to examine the true density of discursive contradictions which may well be constituted of seemingly rival, yet wholly compatible strands of superficial ‘froth’ – even where this requires unravelling some of my own metaphors. One such figurative formulation in need of a good tweak is that of ‘branches of ideological directory trees’, for that central qualifier is thus used, lackadaisically, so commonly that even us critical scholars, keenly knee-deep in theoretical debates related to historical materialism, often appear to forget that there is a better meaning to it – ultimately, a more effective meaning – than that which Napoleon Bonaparte ascribed², and which Raymond Aron tried to petrify, with his “ideology is the idea of my adversary” (Aron, 1937: 65).

In sum, the discursive contradictions of Web3 players can find a safe niche, beneath an umbrella meta-discourse of the present grand futures of digital communication. For now, let’s simply note how this last has been bolstered by the spurious notion of ‘hyperstition’ initially staged as an “element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time-travelling potentials” (CCRU, 1999: 68). Yet to understand what those forms really are (beyond fortune cookie prophecies) and how they operate, we’ll have to acknowledge orders of mediation and interplay (and the reciprocal or bidirectional character of these links) between different realms or levels: that of the cultural forms themselves; that of social institutions, procedures and socio-technical norms, dispositifs; and that of material relations of production between human beings, and by extension relations including humans and other life-forms. This analysis will attempt to apprehend a process of ideologisation in its entirety; it shall encompass factors determining the existence, and the potential effectivity, of given cultural forms. One way of understanding effectivity is the ability to support the generation of exchange value, and it can be postulated that this is a characteristic feature of Web3 discourse (although by no means exclusive to this field). A first indicator of this feature, and an obvious line of inquiry, is the inflation of communicative and cultural production among Web3 players.

¹: With this term, I’m referring to ‘cultural forms’ of material relations of production, implying specific conceptualisation that I’ll summon and develop in this part of my work.

²: “In its modern sense, the concept of ‘ideology’ only emerged when Napoleon rebuked that group of philosophers [around Destutt de Tracy] (who opposed the new Caesar and his intoxication with power) by disdainfully dubbing them idéologues. The term thus acquired, for the first time, the pejorative meaning it retains to this day – much like the word doctrinaire. Yet if we examine the deeper meaning of this ‘contempt’, we begin to discern the epistemological and ontological devaluation it expresses. For the adversary’s thought is stripped of all value here, and we can pinpoint the thrust of this devaluation more precisely: it is ontological and epistemological because it targets the opposing thought as unreal.” (Mannheim, 2006 / 1929: 61)