Previous | Next | Contents

In sum, the tech giants are by no means outside of Web3, nor the other way round (and I’ve barely mentioned the question of venture funding, equity and partnerships as yet); the platforms of the Internet oligopoly-and-fringes are omnipresent where Web3 players are busy solving problems. Computer scientist and arch-crypto-skeptic Pablo Rauzy would say that the only problems blockchains solve are the ones that they devise in the first place. Yet before we even consider his scathing critique of the technology itself, let’s briefly turn back to my own sixty odd adepts, many of whom would retort that they’re actually busy setting up services that allow people to distribute or promote cultural works, to manage their own data flows and communicative interactions, to share knowledge or enhance creative experiences. Many would indeed make these claims before even touching on the issue of how their tools allow cultural or communicative agents to use tokens to take part in fairer and better informed decision making. Eventually, as we’ve seen, most of them would get round to the question of enrichment, or to the point that the average crypto bro would begin with: yield farming, passive rewards, automated market maker systems and smart contract hacks: “to the moon!” And a handful of them might know enough computer coding to navigate a GitHub repository, to trace consensus changes or simulate a fork by running a node on a testnet. But most of them don’t have a clue when it comes to actually auditing code or designing consensus mechanics. The majority of crypto players are similarly trading ‘code-blind’, aping ‘smart money’ (whale wallets or VC-backed projects) or relying on cherry-picked audit reports and algorithmically peddled rumours. This is precisely where we find an analogy between the activity of Web3 players and forms of labour (including audience labour) carried out in countless fields, which are as many ‘markets’ from which digital intermediation platforms extract rents: online tarot reading, accommodation, fashion influencer videos, political commentary, sports betting, pornography, academic counselling, eSports – to name just a few.

We need to go back to some elementary theoretical points that underpin the concept of audience labour; they are pressing us to return to the variant – if not outright conflicting – understandings of ideology. Of course, the concept Brice Nixon develops is furthering the insights of Dallas Smythe’s work on ‘audience commodity’ as a “blindspot of Western Marxism” (1977). Maxime Ouellet praises Smythe’s relevance for having sparked a debate about the role of communication in contemporary capitalism:

“[In] advanced or monopoly capitalism, it is no longer only the time devoted to commodity production that generates surplus value. The reproduction of labour power itself becomes a source of surplus value, as it is captured even before being activated – that is, before entering into the wage-labor relation of domination. Consequently, in monopoly capitalism, the duality established by traditional Marxism between the productive infrastructure and the cultural superstructure becomes blurred, since the mass media have the dual function of producing surplus value on the one hand, and legitimising relations of domination on the other”. (2019: 86)

There are admittedly several minor issues with this reading. What Smythe was effectively referring to is a dual mode of valorisation specific to advertising-based mass media which produce commodities not only in the form of industrially manufactured ‘texts’ (news, entertainment, etc.) but also via audiences whose ‘attention’ can be sold to advertisers – both indeed representing sources of surplus value (schematically put). Moreover, it should be recalled – briefly, at this point – that the question of ‘traditional Marxism’ separating the productive infrastructure and cultural superstructures was already one of significant debate in the late 1970s, as we can observe from this extract of Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature:

“The social and political order which maintains a capitalist market, like the social and political struggles which created it, is necessarily a material production. From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press: any ruling class, in variable ways, though always materially, produces a social and political order. These are never superstructural activities. They are the necessarily material production within which an apparently self-subsistent mode of production can alone be carried on. The complexity of this process is especially remarkable in advanced capitalist societies, where it is wholly beside the point to isolate ‘production’ and ‘industry’ from the comparably material production of ‘defence’, ‘law and order’, ‘welfare’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘public opinion.’” (Williams, 1977: 93)

Ouellet notes how second generation cultural studies scholars accused Smythe of lapsing into a form of economic determinism akin to ‘vulgar Marxism’ – perhaps slighted by findings that undermine their preoccupation with the “froth on the surface” (Garnham, Fuchs, 2014: 115)¹. He recalls that one of three critiques levelled by Graham Murdock against the audience commodity thesis is that, in its effort to purge all traces of ‘idealism’, it sidelines the ideological critique of media and the question of the relative autonomy of cultural superstructures vis-à-vis the material base – ultimately failing to account for the ‘ideological’ role of media (Ouellet, op. cit.: 88). Ouellet’s own formulation of a “dual function” (producing surplus value, and legitimising relations of domination) ought to be rephrased as a simultaneous one, for that is precisely the theoretical direction in which Smythe’s conclusions led subsequent scholars. Brice Nixon in particular expands upon these, drawing from Raymond Williams’ premise that “means of communication are themselves means of production” (Williams, 1980: 50-63), and suggesting that within the audience labour process, it should also be inferred from Williams’ proposal, cultural ‘texts’ (the ‘contents’ of the CCIs) can be understood as a means of production insofar as they constitute an “object of audience labour” (Nixon, op. cit.: 724). To briefly clarify this point it should be reminded that where Dallas Smythe and Bill Livant relied on aspects of Marx’s theory of labour as source of value presented in Volume I of Marx’s

Let’s go one step further and assume that if the audience labour process was once predominantly the domain of the CCIs, it is now effectively extended to vast swathes of social activity via digital intermediation platforms and applications, in the same broad sweep that has blurred the lines between professional and laymen, and inherently transforms both former amateurs and waged workers into legions of freelance labourers (Matthews, 2017: 44). Brice Nixon’s analysis of Google is noteworthy, insofar as it suggests a template for a systematic, comprehensive mode of valorisation:

“While Google’s users are relatively empowered as digital cultural laborers, as digital audience laborers they are no more empowered, or any less exploited, than any other audience laborers in other eras of the capitalist mode of communicative production. Even in the digital era, processes of communication are also processes of capital accumulation specifically because communicative capitalists control audience activities of cultural consumption and exploit audience laborers (either directly or indirectly)”. (Nixon, op. cit.: 237)

Admittedly, we still observe here a formal distinction between, on the one hand, the platform’s strategy of granting ‘free’ usage in exchange for the generation of ‘contents’ (or by poorly remunerating these contributions of ‘digital cultural labourers’), and on the other hand, its parasitical strategy as a tool controlling access to objects of audience labour. Yet, expanding digital communications applications ever more, and combining these two facets of the valorisation process, make for a false ‘empowerment’ of user-consumers, while in fine exploiting both cultural and audience labour to accumulate capital (Ibid.: 239-241). If at first Nixon suggests a fundamental continuity with the CCIs (and thus with the mass media that Smythe analysed), it can be argued that the proliferation of intermediation platforms effectively confirms the dissolution of these institutions, as established and consolidated throughout the twentieth century – and indeed as they have been distinctly ‘understood’ by political economy of communications for the past fifty years. The proliferation of discursive production, and often mundane, semi-automated, or code-based practices, which characterises work on and from digital intermediation platforms in so many fields can in turn be ‘understood’ as a formidable expansion of the fait idéologique far beyond the frontiers and remit of the former CCIs. The purpose of Capital therein is absolutely the integration of the different forms of labour and the legitimisation of these material relations of production, both simultaneously contributing to the generation of surplus value (not least as these complementary facets of the valorisation process are thoroughly fuelled by the discursive and practical inputs of labourers themselves). Theodor Adorno’s writings on kulturindustrie may be reexamined for what they are: not some draft of a political economy of the cultural sector, but a steep warning about long-term transformations affecting human thought, and the relationship between commodification and the production of cultural forms:

“Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great that it calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities which must be swallowed anyway. The culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of ‘good will’ per se, without regard for particular firms or saleable objects.” (Adorno, 1975: 13).

The hypothesis I will begin to outline at this juncture is that Web3 should not be considered as just one more field where contemporary capitalism’s vanguard of digital intermediation platforms prospect, nurture and reap – but rather as a qualitative leap in a deeper historical process: the objectification of the Warenform (commodity form) into Denkform (thought form), initially theorised by Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1936: 92–140).

As we have seen from empirical evidence provided in part one, Web3 is unquestionably marked by an inflation of superficial and seemingly contradictory discursive production. Acknowledged by our interviewees, this activity is justified by the need, on the one hand, to convince and convert in the face of massive external hostility, distrust, ignorance, and on the other hand, to bolster the small communities that they adhere to within the ‘Web3 space’ (geographically dispersed groups/networks constituted around specific blockchains and protocols, around collective ventures, memecoins, NFT collections, etc.). This bolstering also encompasses the more ‘secretive’ production of ‘texts’ that are designed to exclude outsiders and provide group members with supplementary value. One image that came to mind at several occasions during fieldwork trips was that of the secret of the Web3 player, walking down a street in Brooklyn or Zug, apparent to all yet shrouded in the mystery of a realm invisible to the naked eye and as good as incomprehensible to almost all passers-by, even persons of the same age as she or he. More: a realm at once detached from the vicissitudes and solicitations of urban life, yet whose ultimate rewards may at any moment be brought back into the shared, physical reality, transformed into that universal, money – a sanctuary, yes, but not some wanton ‘hobby’ like speaking Sindarin, painting Warhammer figures, inhaling nitrous oxide, filming GRWMs and Pokemon pack openings, etc. I recall thinking of this as interviewee 52 spoke of the secretive communities of his foundation as a highly desirable aspect of Web3, spurring participation of youngsters who spend time and energy in heated debates online, obsessing with particularities of treasury management and governance strategies, discussing the relevance of such and such referenda. It’s engagement, I offered him, it almost reminds me of the intense political mobilisation of New Left groups back in the late 1960s. Yes, he exulted, engagement! Rebels without a cause also came to mind, but I kept that to myself. Another, more experienced and discerning entrepreneur interviewed during that mission expressed this more prosaically:

“It’s a culture. It’s like they identify with this really cool thing. (…) And the coolness, the parameters that determine the coolness is all those sort of bullshit things, that mean nothing really. They just (...) think they mean something, but they mean absolutely jack shit. (…) It’s like a cabal, it’s becoming more and more so, because all those words become more and more complex. (…) There’s always this sort of very abstract discussion about minutiae. It reminds me of theologians in the Middle Ages, sort of discussing, you know, this incredibly... How many angels you’ve got on… (laughter) and that kind of thing. And it’s all for good, you know, it’s for the salvation of our souls, clearly! (laughter)” (i54)

Certainly, one should not underestimate the importance of the inflated production of obscure texts, and the debates which remind our respondent of the famous trope from medieval scholastic theology, of how many angels can dance on a pinhead. It is remarkable how he links his intuition of the illusory, superficial nature of this production to the question of inclusion within specific chapels of the Web3 church. More crucially though, two points should be highlighted at this point. Firstly, note the respondent’s intuition of young Web3 players taking part in the production of “a culture”. Secondly, observe his reference to the concept of identity, which – I will argue – should not be reduced to the narrow and nebulous culturalist framing of a ‘socially constructed self’ but rather considered along Adorno’s terms, as pertaining to a deeper mechanism of domination. My point is that ideology shouldn’t be reduced to the abstract, ungrounded conjuring up of ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ political ideas, nor to the frantic dissemination of commentary that digital platforms require as their lifeblood. First, we must plainly acknowledge that there are structural determinants to ‘ideological’ production. There are causal links – one order of mediations – between the material relations of production in which human beings are individually and collectively engaged, and the multifarious, contrary, superficial ‘ideological’ texts that they produce and exchange. Second, we must seek out the deeper root of ideology, and its fundamental contingence (a task to which I will of course return). This entails stepping aside from the pervasive use of the notion of ideology and the ahistorical, idealist framing of ideologisation caricatured in slogans like “Everyone does ideology!”. It means critically confronting the widespread definition that a Limor Shifman regurgitates, that of “a set of values and beliefs (...) that guide the ways in which social actors behave, evaluate the world, and justify their deeds and assessments”, “abstract entities [functioning] as ‘moral compasses’ that help people to differentiate between good and bad, desirable and avoidable” (Shifman, 2019: 48-49). Beginning here, one can see where a lot of contemporary – critically inclined – academic work on Web3 is essentially placing the cart before the horse.

For example, consider the conclusions of Ann Brody, Tamara Knese and Julie Frizzo-Barker’s aforementioned work. They write: “We are hopeful that future research can focus on how Ethereum – regardless of its infusion with ideologies, Californian or otherwise – shapes real-world relationships and modes of governance for participants in its ecosystem.” (Brody et al., op. cit.: 4177). Firstly, Ethereum constitutes a socio-technical dispositif based on a complex assemblage of a specific type of ‘text’, namely programs written in Solidity and Vyper using a set of operational rules written in languages like Go, Rust, or Python; I would argue that analysing how it might “shape” (afford or command) specific relations of production (and how it integrates with broader such relations, given that these combined constitute material bases of “real-world relationships”) cannot be done regardless of the problem of ideology; correctly apprehending this problem is a necessary condition for that analysis. Secondly, I would caution against the risk that processes of ideologisation retain their full mystifying and obfuscating power if they are primarily grasped as the ‘infusion’, by abstract ‘sets of values and beliefs’ (such as ‘the Californian Ideology’) of a socio-technical dispositif that is in turn represented as having the ability to “(shape) real-world relationships”. An equally misleading simplification can be found with Quinn DuPont’s argument that the evolution from Bitcoin to broader blockchain technologies represents an “an abstraction (and elimination) of ideology and meaning” (Dupont, 2019: 21)² He argues that if Bitcoin was deeply rooted in a libertarian ethos focused on resistance to centralised authority and the creation of a new kind of money, blockchain applications like smart contracts and Dapps now prioritise their potential as open ledger technologies, valued for technical features such as transparency, immutability, and efficiency, rather than their libertarian underpinnings. In essence, while Bitcoin was a movement grounded in ‘values’ and ‘vision’, the broader blockchain ‘ecosystem’ has become more utilitarian; exit ideology! In another article, Ann Brody and Stéphane Couture reference DuPont’s work, in particular his suggestion that cryptocurrencies and blockchains constitute ‘media’ – a term used in somewhat diverse ways throughout his book: as a tool allowing us “to control what we create, to produce the society we want” (

This is in fact characteristic of a recurrent pattern that one encounters in much contemporary sociological or socio-economic research on Web3: a more or less deliberate drive to redeem the vision of a purposeful, progressive and participatory Internet – blockchains as tikkun olam! In this respect, it echoes one of the salient traits of the discursive production identified in part one – Web3 players’ seemingly contradictory claim of disruption and perfection of capitalism – which stems in part, as we have noted, from a dim sense of unease with contemporary civilisation, and from the seductive ‘ideological’ appeal of blockchain technology as the ‘game-changer’ which will address both structural and individual constraints. Before I move further into the theoretical foundations that might allow us to analyse this production of ‘symbolic values’ in regard to the (specific and broad) ‘economic’ valorisation processes which these players take part in, let’s briefly consider one particularly telling aspect of ‘blockchain praxis’ – the forms of ‘cognitive dissonance’ experienced (and diverse coping strategies and defence mechanisms developed) when realities of their day-to-day labour fail to live up to these promises (Karatzogianni, Matthews & Vachet, op. cit.).

One clear example of this was offered by a Brooklyn based player (i31) working for the innovation and investment wing of one of the leading blockchain software companies (with a client roster featuring JPMorgan and Microsoft). Right at the start of our talk, he recalled his time at college: “I had a keen interest in economic inequality (…) from the benefit of being able to travel when I was young, seeing in real life how great I had it and how some other people had it not so great, as a result of, you know, usually pretty random reasons, that weren’t their fault of course.” Discovering crypto in 2016, he “saw that it unlocked a lot of opportunities”. This epiphany came, in particular, with the discovery of how blockchains were used during the Syrian refugee crisis (which he incorrectly associates with a different Middle Eastern country):

“The big example that I like to point out is like really, really early days. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this: the World Food Program allocated a bunch of aid through crypto basically. You could like use a biometric identifier to receive… and this was during the Jordanian refugee crisis. A lot of people from Jordan were leaving, showing up in, you know, everywhere across Europe and had no aid and (…) the rest of the international community sent a bunch of aid, but a lot of it gets siphoned off to corruption and such. So they were trying to remove the corruption.”

After helping to co-found the now defunct Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition, our interviewee gradually moved on to his current position advising on early-stage venture investments coupled with portfolio management. This included start-ups in the media and culture industries, as well as a particular focus “on the scientific community and all of the IP that’s created around drug research”. He stressed for instance how this work entails “not judging a team based on their expertise to build a great Web 2 product with a slick UX. You’re looking at a team in terms of their ability to gather up a strong community of people in the scientific community.” Asked whether all these ventures “are fully adhering to the Web3 ethos”, he answered: “I would say, in short, no. I think what a lot of people have found is that fully adhering to the Web3 ethos means you’re going to likely lose out on a lot of potential mainstream adoption. (…) So we’re kind of seeing, I think, an intelligent pull back to, like Web 2.5.” This brought me to the question of organisation of labour and how many of our previous fifty interviewees had mentioned difficulties related to the amount of time spent on communicative tasks using social media such as Discord and Telegram. He responded without hesitation:

“I think there's an interesting tension between, you know, most people in crypto believe that they’re kind of building the future in some form or fashion. But then the lived version of that is a future we don’t want to live in. So I think that’s like a pretty brutally honest way of... and I call it out often. (…) And I think that some of the benefits of crypto, like people in the speculative portion of crypto will say ‘Yeah, it's a 24/7 market, there’s no shutting it off, it can’t be censored, etc.’. The downside of that is: it’s a 24/7 market and it can’t be shut off and you always have access to it, so if you’re trading there, you can do it all day, every day, and burn out.”

As Kobe De Kere, Martin Trans and Stephania Milan observe, cryptocurrency is seen “by users or investors as valuable, not only because they inscribe it into a certain vision of the future, but because the technology behind it (...) also [permits] a different future to be imagined altogether”; the “technology becomes the metaphor for a different society to be imagined and translated into practice”. (De Keere et al, 2024: 5). Yet, as we have seen, the belief of being “outside the system” or “in the future now” meets actual conditions of labour which are just as stressful as in other areas of tech, all the more so given the pre-existing expectations of the players involved, and the specific difficulties of entering this field from prior positions in Web 2.0. This is clearly expressed by a San Francisco based co-founder of a blockchain-enabled video streaming platform: “That conversion [to Web3] is crazy. Even myself recently going through it, it was very daunting.” (i23). Borderline schizophrenic undertones are present in the declarations of many interviews, as we can see from the words of this Milan based co-founder of a Web3 data brokerage platform:

“We’re are all stressed, but we are also happy because we know we are ambitious. We will try to do always more. So we are angry with ourselves, not with others, because we would like always to improve. (…) Me and my business partners are so happy. Yeah, we work a lot, you have to work a lot. We know, but we are happy. Of course we are stressed because every founder and entrepreneur is stressed, I think.” (i41)

Alongside reports of clinical depression and ADHD worsened by Web3 practices, the main issue raised by our respondents is undoubtedly addiction, as the following two interviewees state (the first is the founder of Web3 writing community; the second the producer of a Web3 podcast): “Ultimately the underlying kind of mechanism, I believe, of that whole system is addiction. (…) Platforms are optimised for you to be addicted to them, for you to check every day and to make trades and to have your emotional state and be actually fluctuating in line with those things.” (i37) “Something that people know, but don’t really necessarily acknowledge or have answers to that, is the fact that, digital addiction is sort of almost like a necessary thing within within the crypto space.” (i35) If these two declarations are representative of the most critical discourses encountered within the ‘Web3 space’, another startling account came from an interview with a New York based platform partnership agent, who happened to have a “day job” working “as a scientist at a mental health company that uses artificial intelligence to fix people’s brains when they’re mentally ill.” This respondent spoke of “the unhealthy emotions that are involved with large amounts of money” but also explained how the clients of this company comprised “high performing people [that] put a lot of pressure on themselves”. He explained: “We’re actually working both with trauma cases and performance cases; there are people who want to measure their brains, to have better performance, to be more creative and better focus... The use of psychedelics, frankly, is becoming quite common: psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, ketamine, in a professional framework, with guidance, for performance, micro-dosing”. (i27) This information confirmed our earlier (and ongoing) suspicion that some of our interviewees were in an altered state of consciousness. One vivid illustration of this might be found in this rambling, fast-paced response that a Montreal based platform manager gave to a remark I made about his somewhat buoyant tone:

“You’ve got to have that fitness of an organism, the company as an organism. (…) It’s about opportunity. For the profit side of the enterprising man of me, there has to be opportunity. If everything was the same (...) and there was no change, there’d be no opportunity and I would be very upset, because I’d have to do the same thing everyday, to go to the same job, the same place, the same routine. There would be no change, and I think I would be an upset person in that environment. But when there is a lot of opportunity, it allows that ability to evolve, for people who are okay to change their mind and be wrong and continue to execute and evolve. And I failed, we’ve failed so many times, we’ve fucked up. And you fail better, and just go with it, and it’s a sunny day, you’ve caught me on a good day, I’m in a good flow state. (…) I’m in sales mode right now, for our companies and stuff, doing pitches every other day, writing posts every other day, trying to recruit every other day. You’ve got to be able to sell the vision and do the branding.” (i8)

Bear in mind, at this juncture, the hypothesis of Web3 practice as ‘taking it out against yourself’, where aspects of the ego ideal – the utopian collaborationist, the prefigurative idealist – are masochistically targeted, undergoing a process of self-sabotage, from the failures of fantasy and the assaults of engulfing structural constraints. Self-harm and mental unwell-being becomes the ultimately misguided oppositional gesture of the schizoid subject – in sum, a ‘logical’ praxis for an historical moment marred by grievance-based identity-politics. With this proposition, consider that any such micro-political punishment might best be understood not as ‘ideological’ production per se, but as a specific mediation of material relations of production in which these players are bound – ‘collateral damage’ – and one facet, or moment, of a broader collective process of ideologisation.

¹: I add this short excerpt from the debate between Fuchs and Garnham, in which Garnham revisits his research trajectory and – in a curious anecdotal twist – commits a sort of written slip: the word ‘froth’ is misspelled with an i, inadvertently evoking one of the most fashionable culturalist figures of the past forty years: “The other problem – and I still think this is the case – was that I thought the cultural studies people (…) were exaggerating the effects of what is narrowly called cultural practice on life in general and its development. For all the talk of an information society and so on and so forth, if you look at current debates about where our society is going, the important developments are not cultural, they are not the development of social media or anything; I mean that is the frith on the surface.”

²: The page number provided here and in subsequent citations from ePub versions of books is as appears in full screen on a 13.3 inch screen.

³: Here, DuPont borrows from Georg Simmel and then from Sybille Krämer.

⁴: Beyond traditional full-time private sector wage labor (manual or intellectual) I am referring here to variants such as freelance work, piecework, forced part-time wage labour, casual wage labour, domestic labour, audience labour, workfare, internships and unpaid labour, self-exploitation, forced/prison labour, child labour, craft production-based and subsistence labour, commons/cooperative-organised labour and remaining forms of civil service-based labour.

Thanks for the pic Mr Granjon.