Hello dear reader, as explained previously this is part two in a series exploring culture and tech. I’m not sure how you found this without reading the first part but would advise you do so.
L1s are cults. People have been saying this. Sometimes they might be softened to communities, but in many cases the emojis, laser eyes, and tickers acolytes attach to their names have more to in common with dogmatic pseudoreligious bodies than any bubbly internet subculture. This can easily be explained with towards financial stake in removing incentives for critical evaluation. The potential to create a better, more equitable world has a high premium in the market for meaning.
But I think this direction misses an important point. Crypto is a sociopolitical movement even more than it is a technological shift. Indoctrination pushes builders to value its ethos, and the tokens can be seen as a coordination mechanism to align incentives among participants. In other words, the cult in the point. If this is true, however, I would argue there are significantly better ways to create an effective one.
Finding a single set of principles all participants agree on across networks and ecosystems is difficult. Across most, there will be some connection to general cypherpunk ideals. With Bitcoin, additional emphasis on independence and immutability. Ethereum; credible neutrality, Cosmos; sovereignty and localization, privacy in Monero and ZCash, and so on for the rest. People working in crypto are aware of this, as the technologies were created with these goals and ideals in mind.
There is a potential pitfall in what happens next, where instead of continuing to build systems and technologies with the "original" ethos, the network's proliferation becomes its own ideal. Our obligations to technology supersede obligations to ourselves. There are two major pitfalls here:
Web3 now becomes a catch-all for anyone using my database. Although the tech stacks have been created with a certain purpose, their permissionless nature leaves them open to "alternative use." When any business model, intent, ideal, or structure expressible through smart contracts can be put on a blockchain, what does it represent? Cue the "socialist" VCs, sociopaths, and old-fashioned scammers. Each operating at different levels of sophistication to get every section of the curve. There used to be rug pulls in the bull market. Now we sit around executing highly profitable strategies and asking congress to pretty please ban the competition. "All cool, as long as it's on chain, though." In the end, this was likely inevitable. Eventually, both sides will infect each other. But hopefully we can all learn to pause, consider, and recognize the motivations behind each contract or system we interact with.
The second, more dangerous, effect is a myopic view of people who have now settled on some single token, network, or approach to the issues that originally motivated them. While they are useful, it would be quite bold to proclaim no alternatives exist to fix the problems web3 attempts to solve. Maybe this is true for a global financial system. But I'm less sure about income inequality, surveillance capitalism, or even public goods funding. By starting with a technology and looking forward, If people from different L1s have trouble talking with each other, do they have any hope of recognizing and building towards real value outside their current camps? This is where the cult becomes a liability.
It is not my goal to convince anyone to change their ideology, but rather to dig deeper. To build culturally motivated technology, rather than culture in service to technology. In what ways can we take advantage of a blockchain’s best properties, while using alternate structures to cover its shortcomings? Where might the good of the network clash with the needs of its participants? What lessons can be taken from “trad web2” to avoid making the same mistakes? I have no answers for these questions and maybe yours will be different. But I think they can be helpful to stay on track towards a meaningful endgame.