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Why not begin with memecoins? It’s 2025 and possibly over a million have been launched. Even if roughly 90% are failures in terms of attracting value, consider how their – indeed wholly abstract – existence requires real material resources: from the intellectual labour of the humans involved in their inception, to the equipment and electrical energy needed to mint them, to register transactions and store this value, and more significantly the vast infrastructures on which these exchanges rely; on to the zealous communicational labour of promoters, influencers and followers, buyers, sellers and intermediaries – seemingly futile X posts, the data shifting of emoticons and likes, drawn-out videos of interviews and endless commentary, second-long sequences converted into gifs, vociferous fall-outs on discord servers, etc. If you pause to actually reflect on the resources deployed around what Web3 players themselves name ‘shitcoins’ it is startling. Or take, for example, so-called ‘SocialFi’ applications, which effectively allow users to bet on the social engagement of specific individuals: Web3 Twitter influencer ‘cards’ (in the form of NFTs) are collected and traded in order to create rosters and line-ups for weekly tournaments, and participants can earn token-based rewards or further influencer packs. This seemingly playful activity entails elaborate, coordinated forms of ‘regular’ intellectual labour, akin to that of the traditional financial sector (not to mention the burgeoning of secondary markets around these applications), as well as informal labour, for instance in the case of hacks of influencers’ accounts to post viral content that might increase or decrease the score of specific ‘cards’. For the layman discovering crypto-asset markets, however bewildering the wild proliferation of unregulated derivatives, it is perhaps the swarming cultural production associated with these products which is the most confusing. How does one begin to explain to him the purpose of a collection of Remilio NFTs, ten thousand AI-generated male avatars on the Ethereum blockchain, created as a counterpart to the popular Remilia Collective’s “Milady” NFT project? How might he comprehend what makes each one “unique”, what it means to use a Remilio as a “profile picture”, and how this isn’t “just an investment but an identity signal within crypto circles” (to quote one servile chatbot)? Most significantly, how might a novice (say someone with a little experience of legacy finance) make sense of the actual time that ‘crypto-bros’ spend in such ostensibly ludicrous interactions – if compared, of course, to the straight-laced, sane occupations of a certified accountant, an internal auditor, or a credit risk analyst?

Virtually all our interviewees referred, in some form or another, to the obligatory and extremely time-consuming nature of communicative labour – the average reported time spent in front of a screen was just over eleven hours per day (although one respondent confessed to having spent up to eighteen hours, for periods of several months). Intense usage of social media was seen as a necessity, in order to attract more people into the ‘space’, given both its novelty and noxious reputation. It is essential to connect with larger players and brands, to enter into new communities, and of course to manage and maintain these groups. The ambivalence of this labour, both rewarding and extremely tiresome, is summed up here: “Web3 industry is very competitive. Sometimes you struggle, because you have to educate a lot of people to get projects. And then you spend a lot of time hustling, but for me at least, all this is fulfilling. (…) You have to repeat again and again, to people, and this is exhausting. It’s absolutely exhausting.” (i50) Interviewees were aware that social media usage and content production was an absolute necessity in order to attract value, stating a clear link between symbolic value and financial value creation:

How do you step away from this digital world when you (...) need that digital world to create the revenue to keep you going, to keep creating work? But if you don’t step away from it at points, it becomes too much, especially if you’re trying to do that while you’re trying to be an artist and be a businessman and be an entrepreneur, and do all of this stuff and be a social media manager, it’s a lot of stress. (i1).

Other participants referred to the compulsive nature of their work patterns, such as the founder of a Web3 platform, who gave the following account of his experience of managing NFT-based intellectual property splits subsequent to online music production camps: “One of the bigger problems or effects was lack of sleep. I couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night all the time and I couldn’t go back to sleep. And I would just think about this, constantly.” (i11) Web3 players are aware of the extreme cognitive stimulus induced by their activity – in particular the constant tracking of prices, rates, market capitalisation and token circulation. Time and time again, our respondents referred to the fact that unlike in traditional markets “trading never stops in crypto” (i18) and that “things happen so fast that you feel the need to (...) be connected to it all the time” (i1). One participant declared: “On average, I deal with 2000 to 3000 notifications a day (…), and that includes the weekends. I mean, it’s a 24/7 business: (...) I’m dealing with people in all parts of the world at all times of day.” (i26). Another went a step further, speaking of “communication habits of the ecosystem [which] incentivize a toxic relationship”:

“You really need to be always available to talk with whoever, in order to solve the problem. Because, for example, in traditional world, instead of Telegram, you just have, like Google Teams or Microsoft Teams, and you just talk with your teammates during the work hours. (...) But here it’s like a 24/7, running. And it’s also because you are always working with people from multiple timezones. It’s not like you just work with European people, but also you work with US people and Asians and that means that you need to be like 24/7.” (i49)

In short, at this point, it’s worth considering what kind of labour our Web3 agitators are actually engaging in when they are solving problems, dealing with notifications, being a social media manager, educating and hustling, and generally being unable to step away from the digital world.

First, I contend that these players are primarily involved in the production and circulation of what David Hesmondhalgh (drawing here from the theoretical framework of cultural studies) refers to as ‘texts’ – “cultural ‘works’ (…) that have an influence on our understanding of the world” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 2-3) and that may be defined by “a matter of degree, a question of balance between its functional and communicative aspects” (Ibid.: 11). His definition admittedly pertains to the seemingly ‘finished’ products of the culture and communication industries (CCIs) – traditionally editions of newspapers, copies of printed books, music recordings or video games, etc. However, I argue that this focus on blister-sealed contents, industrially manufactured for mass consumption, is conceptually somewhat misleading. The key point is that ‘texts’, in all their fragmentary or complete, polished or rough guises, can be understood as ‘ideological’ production. Incessant collective efforts, which compile, intertwine, modify and expand a multitude of shared ‘texts’, contribute to more persistent cultural forms that are recognised and experienced, by large social groups. Secondly, I recall the obvious – that ‘texts’ have been analysed (by Hesmondhalgh and so many other socio-economists or political economists of media) as depending on a specific type of labour that was organised, and valorised, within specific institutions: multinational firms and subsidiaries, independent companies, cooperatives and other types of non-profit associations, individual commercial entities, etc., which comprise the culture and communication industries. Yet this reminder must at once be qualified, in light of both theoretical advances and, to some degree, ‘practical’ evolutions.

Firstly, it is by design that I prefer the notion of culture and communication industries to the term used by Hesmondhalgh and many other scholars (not to mention the specious construct of ‘cultural and creative industries’ (Garnham, 2005: 15-29)). Not only does it attest to the historical process of imbrication of ‘text’ producing activities within digital telecommunication systems – a decisive feature of the past five decades; it also acknowledges the essential role of communicative practices in the production of cultural forms. Public retreats (whether in the form of privatisation or funding cuts) and the financialisation (Bouquillion, 2008) of these industries constitute a pivotal factor, eroding the socially progressive purpose which they held, to some degree, during the postwar welfare state era. Their subsumption under extractive ‘market’ logics marks the definitive end of what the co-authors of Capitalisme et Industries Culturelles had metaphorically called the ‘era of the dancers’ (Miège et al, 1979: 7) – that time when investments in this area could still be justified primarily by the bourgeois obsession with intra-class status, whether through ostentatious splashing out on an opera house or a string of newspapers. Moreover, the past two decades have witnessed the ‘collaborative’ turn and the pervasive platformisation of these industries – accelerating their enmeshment with consumer goods and services (Bouquillion & Matthews, 2010; Codagnone et al., 2018).

These profound shifts have confirmed predictions, made by Jean-Guy Lacroix and Gaëtan Tremblay as early as 1997, of “an integration of cultural and communication activities into commodity and industrial space, (…) the spread of cultural sector characteristics to economic production in general (…) and a concomitant dilution of the specificity and density of the fields of culture and communication” (Lacroix & Tremblay, 1997: 117-118). Where the limits of these ‘fields’ have become almost impossible to distinguish, platform managers are themselves morphing into ‘text’ producers, devoting significant time to tasks of user education and agitation (Matthews, Rouzé, 2018: 46-47), and contributing to the dissemination of ‘grand discourses’ around convergence, collaboration and the creative economy (Bouquillion et al., 2013: 27-61). Although these interventions may not derive intellectual property rights nor be transformed into intangible assets, they bear an implicit stamp of authorship, they’re widely circulated and are decisive for the broader valorisation process. Christophe Magis identifies this very phenomenon in an article interrogating financial asset management apps as a culture industry. He notes: “While content production is obviously not their core business, it is nevertheless through the provision of (...) entertainment or educational content that [these apps] help integrate trading into the daily and cultural practices of their young clients.” (Magis, 2021: 105).

The rise of the Internet oligopoly (Smyrnaios, 2018) (and fringe) platforms, and their ‘collaborative’ enrolment of users, has also highlighted the similarly vital nature of the contributions of those formerly known as consumers (although this was already made visible, in the form of music industry’s manque à gagner, with the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing at the turn of the century, and decades earlier, through audiocassette recording). What Brice Nixon (2014) has theorised as ‘audience labour’ – in short, the collective work of ‘completing’ industrially manufactured informational and cultural contents, to produce shared cultural forms – is clearly not a new phenomenon. Indirect payment for access to communicational tools and cultural raw materials is however a key aspect of capitalist valorisation, and one that was more or less ignored by the traditional models of political economy of communication. Toiling on communicative capital’s ‘social media’ platforms, whether through ‘viral marketing’, ‘user-generated content’ production or more simply the automated expropriation of data, may now be seen for what it objectively is: a blatant manifestation of the sick ‘deal’ that oligopoly imposes on its class adversaries – those who own no share of these tools or raw materials, nothing but their labour power. As Lacroix and Tremblay foresaw, vast domains of human activity – meaning making, interpersonal communication, including emotional bonding – once partly situated outside the reach of the CCIs, are now structurally integrated within capitalist valorisation, effectively compelling individuals to pay rent in exchange for the means to produce a common culture. Such a transformation demands rigorous analysis as a new frontier of exploitation.

This phenomenon is also at play with regard to the significant amounts of Web3 ‘text’ production that oligopoly platforms valorise as audience labour. Consider the value derived from the constant stream of communicative interactions that define these players’ everyday lives – including those who claim to question the dominant ‘values’ of contemporary capitalism and embrace blockchain technology as a purportedly alternative model for organisation. Whatever the hype around Farcaster or Lens Protocol, one must bear in mind the overwhelming use of existing Web 2.0 platforms (X, Reddit, Discord, Telegram, TikTok, divisions of Meta and Alphabet groups) for most of the interpersonal or social communication associated with this specific audience labour. As illustrated by Kobe De Keere, Martin Trans and Stefania Milan, a platform like YouTube is a “primary entry point for anyone seeking to understand the value of crypto” (De Keere et al., 2025: 2) – I would add: a mandatory toll gate for anyone wishing to toil in this field. Moreover, they conclude it should be understood as a ‘market device’, exerting a performative effect on society at large, not simply mediating market transactions but enabling and creating them (Ibid.: 24 – note that the authors are referring here to the work of Fabian Muniesa, Yuval Millo, and Michel Callon). At a more fundamental level, the complex management of vast amounts of data that support this communication, and much of Web3’s ‘productive’ activities (crypto exchanges, blockchain node operators, etc.), remain dependent on infrastructure giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, despite the appeal of migration towards decentralised IaaS such as Akash, Fleek or IPFS/Filecoin.