There is a particular kind of community that is fostered by inefficiency: tailgating before a football game, joking around in the line for a waterslide, the collective anticipation of the first chair of the ski lift. The list goes on. The hellos and goodbyes and contemplations of going to a cheesemonger, butcher, baker, fruit and vegetable purveyor, canned fish and preserved goods shop for the weekly shopping. The reciprocal courtesy of ordering a book via a local bookstore and waiting for them to call when it comes in.

So what happens when we eliminate these inefficiencies? When we go to a supermarket with self checkout or order a book on Amazon. Instead of chatting with a half dozen people once a week, we don’t see a single one. What is lost when these inefficiencies are eliminated? I would hazard that it is community.

There are obvious benefits to the trade off. But there are also costs. Each time we make it, we replace relationships with convenience, and we diminish our waning sense of community just a bit. We become a bit more lonely.

Crypto, and particularly web3, has not traded community for convenience. It is noticeably inconvenient. DAOs are confusing, the onboarding as a new joiner is borderline disastrous, servers (where you chat?!) proliferate in a way that makes me, anyway, feel like I might actually be too old to understand it all. Communication is carried out on Telegram (an app I didn’t have until recently); websites are opaque and sometimes deliberately confusing. Want to use the service? It’s actually called a dApp. Want to see the dApp? It’s on a different chain, which your crypto wallet (you don’t have a wallet? too bad) only kind of recognizes. Want to use the dApp? Get ready for the joys of bridging!! As a relative noob to all of this, I can’t overstate how confused I was. 

And yet, I felt like a character in Robin Hood or The Princess Bride. All the dark alleys and dungeons I fell into were crowded with strange and helpful people. From the cultish TempleDAO to the wholesome ReFi DAO, the overall vibe was (to belabor the supermarket metaphor) “person who insists on walking you over to the thing you need and then waiting while you put in in your cart.” The scene they walked you through was chaotic and you didn’t speak the native language. Nevertheless, you’d still be happily sherpa’d off by three or four people (read: avatars of a bear doing drugs, or a lion doing drugs, or an ape that has already done drugs.)

They’d answer your questions in detail, tell you what was going on, and decipher the local patois. There was, without a question, a community. A strange, strong, and welcoming one that was more like an insular and proud foreign country than an anonymous online community (or accidental ponzi). Pretty soon I was on the inside! I knew my way around the place, with all the back doors and unmarked halls, and it was a great feeling. I’d earned it! And I had a lot of people to thank for their guidance.

This view helped me understand the cultural dynamics of web3. Once on the inside, people want to stay connected, to take a stroll through the public square, to walk main street and see and be seen by their peers -- hence whole channels dedicated to saying “good morning” or “gm”. Those in the know pay it forward, because someone helped them. External criticism is treated with a kind of defensive ferocity typically reserved for one’s siblings (a la “only I can call them that.”) In-jokes proliferate and mutate rapidly. This is what community looks like, and it’s befuddling to those optimizing for convenience, because it decidedly does not.

Outside web3, people shout about how little utility web3 tokens and communities deliver, and how decision making is poor, slow, and confusing. Maybe that’s just it? The Why in “why are people using this thing” is that they like being there, in a community. I’m not sure what I really want to say here, except that crypto is the place I've seen the strongest evidence of a digital society. It doesn’t always lead to great places - the frequent opacity around ownership and control combined with intense community is a combination ripe for ponzis and culty “up-only” manias. At the same time, as we’ve stripped our society in relentless pursuit of convenience, I was overjoyed to find a bit of the strange, unique, and fun amid the financial engineering. So, when we talk about making web3 easier, improving the UX and UI so that it can scale, I hope we don’t make it too convenient.

I like being shown around the supermarket.

There is a particular kind of community that is fostered by inefficiency: tailgating before a football game, joking around in the line for a waterslide, the collective anticipation of the first chair of the ski lift. The list goes on. The hellos and goodbyes and contemplations of going to a cheesemonger, butcher, baker, fruit and vegetable purveyor, canned fish and preserved goods shop for the weekly shopping. The reciprocal courtesy of ordering a book via a local bookstore and waiting for them to call when it comes in.

So what happens when we eliminate these inefficiencies? When we go to a supermarket with self checkout or order a book on Amazon. Instead of chatting with a half dozen people once a week, we don’t see a single one. What is lost when these inefficiencies are eliminated? I would hazard that it is community.

There are obvious benefits to the trade off. But there are also costs. Each time we make it, we replace relationships with convenience, and we diminish our waning sense of community just a bit. We become a bit more lonely.

Crypto, and particularly web3, has not traded community for convenience. It is noticeably inconvenient. DAOs are confusing, the onboarding as a new joiner is borderline disastrous, servers (where you chat?!) proliferate in a way that makes me, anyway, feel like I might actually be too old to understand it all. Communication is carried out on Telegram (an app I didn’t have until recently); websites are opaque and sometimes deliberately confusing. Want to use the service? It’s actually called a dApp. Want to see the dApp? It’s on a different chain, which your crypto wallet (you don’t have a wallet? too bad) only kind of recognizes. Want to use the dApp? Get ready for the joys of bridging!! As a relative noob to all of this, I can’t overstate how confused I was. 

And yet, I felt like a character in Robin Hood or The Princess Bride. All the dark alleys and dungeons I fell into were crowded with strange and helpful people. From the cultish TempleDAO to the wholesome ReFi DAO, the overall vibe was (to belabor the supermarket metaphor) “person who insists on walking you over to the thing you need and then waiting while you put in in your cart.” The scene they walked you through was chaotic and you didn’t speak the native language. Nevertheless, you’d still be happily sherpa’d off by three or four people (read: avatars of a bear doing drugs, or a lion doing drugs, or an ape that has already done drugs.)

They’d answer your questions in detail, tell you what was going on, and decipher the local patois. There was, without a question, a community. A strange, strong, and welcoming one that was more like an insular and proud foreign country than an anonymous online community (or accidental ponzi). Pretty soon I was on the inside! I knew my way around the place, with all the back doors and unmarked halls, and it was a great feeling. I’d earned it! And I had a lot of people to thank for their guidance.

This view helped me understand the cultural dynamics of web3. Once on the inside, people want to stay connected, to take a stroll through the public square, to walk main street and see and be seen by their peers -- hence whole channels dedicated to saying “good morning” or “gm”. Those in the know pay it forward, because someone helped them. External criticism is treated with a kind of defensive ferocity typically reserved for one’s siblings (a la “only I can call them that.”) In-jokes proliferate and mutate rapidly. This is what community looks like, and it’s befuddling to those optimizing for convenience, because it decidedly does not.

Outside web3, people shout about how little utility web3 tokens and communities deliver, and how decision making is poor, slow, and confusing. Maybe that’s just it? The Why in “why are people using this thing” is that they like being there, in a community. I’m not sure what I really want to say here, except that crypto is the place I've seen the strongest evidence of a digital society. It doesn’t always lead to great places - the frequent opacity around ownership and control combined with intense community is a combination ripe for ponzis and culty “up-only” manias. At the same time, as we’ve stripped our society in relentless pursuit of convenience, I was overjoyed to find a bit of the strange, unique, and fun amid the financial engineering. So, when we talk about making web3 easier, improving the UX and UI so that it can scale, I hope we don’t make it too convenient.

I like being shown around the supermarket.