Ok, there's a decent sized F1 fanbase in most tech circles. I'm sure there are all kinds of racing nerds around tech, quite frankly. It is still, however, a pretty niche interest. In mainstream USA I would also say it's far more common for people to associate racing with the redneck Nascar culture than the svelte European F1 scene. Just watch Talladega Nights and you'll understand where I'm coming from.

Cars mean many things to different people: status, luxury, freedom, adventure, work... but as long as it doesn't break down, makes them look cool, and/or gets them where they need to go, most people don't think twice about their car, more less about why it is able to do what it does. That's for the realm of the 'car nut', and these individuals are generally not known to be well rounded conversationalists; like most nerds.

What's fun to me, as a car nerd who loves automotive history, is how intertwined the racing industry is with the development of the modern car. In the beginning, the early 'stock factory car' was pretty negligent on features. One of the earliest Benz didn't even have brakes! Thank goodness Bertha, Carl Benz's wife and arguably the more important car nerd in the family, actually took the prototype out into the world and interfaced with the public to figure out these important necessities.

Beyond just 'taking it for a spin', we have dozens of essential modern safety features that have come from racing; like in-vehicle tire pressure monitoring, traction control systems, not to mention the performance things like fuel injection and turbo chargers. Even more basic, however, are the simplest seeming safety features like crumple-zones or even simply seatbelts!

Cars used to not come with seatbelts at all, in fact, before laws were enforced to require them. The first significant wave of cars to get seatbelts were taxis, adopted from airplane technology, to keep tourists safer bouncing around NYC. Given the choice, however, people often requested factory installed seatbelts be removed when they purchased a new vehicle. Seatbelts were for nerds!

It was when the Sports Car Club of America started requiring seatbelts in all race cars that the idea started to spread throughout the world that this was a practice that needed to be standardized. Today, seatbelts are estimated to reduce the chance of injury or fatality in a crash by up to 60%. Without the racing industry providing the testbed to develop the cultural acceptance as well as produce the numbers of how effective this safety feature was, people would have continued 'opting out' for potentially many more years (evidenced by the number of people today who still refuse to wear theirs despite the risk of getting fined). Racing has always been good for one certainty: a large volume of high speed accidents with complete video footage of every angle.

The same can be said for a lot of car innovations we all take for granted today: the rearview mirror, anti-lock brakes, regenerative braking and hybrid cars in general... all of these technologies exist because the racing industry poured resources into R&D to develop them.

There was a time when stock car racing culture was so pervasive in the US that car manufacturers had a slogan "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everyone was watching the race track to see which car manufacturer had finally improved on the competition.

And yet... to most people (in the US at least) when they think of racing, this is still what they picture in their mind:

I'll be clear: I think it's perfectly fine that most people don't care about racing. It's a niche thing for nerds, without a doubt!

The salient point, I feel, is the relationship between the nerds and the rest of the world. Without the nerds, we all wouldn't be enjoying cars like we do today. And yet... nobody really has to care about trading, I mean racing, in order to benefit from it!

Yes, you caught me. This is an article about crypto!

I find myself getting more and more disillusioned with "web3 culture" because I think, at the end of the day, I just want to be a normie. I understand the tech and why it needs to exist, but I just don't really care for the culture bubble around it. I think it's because I just want to enjoy the modern car, not build the entire racing industry. This is why I never got into NFT's or any of the other cultural trends over the years. I just observe from the outside, fascinated, yet uninterested.

I have my passions that I nerd out about, but web3 does not really scratch the itch in the same way. Simply because I understand what a decentralized blockchain is and how it works and why it matters doesn't mean I want to constantly think about it or talk to people in my life about it. I rarely bring up my work with people in my personal life, and not because I don't think they'll understand what I'm doing. Not because 'it's too hard to describe'. It's just not interesting to them. It's like working on a Nascar pit crew and expecting people you're having lunch with to want to hear about what torque wrench you use. I'm used to people not being interested in my interests, as a lifetime nerd. I'm practiced at talking about other people's interests in social situations.

Trying to promote this industry has forced be to become so obsessed, however, that I've actually lost interest in most of my other passions and hobbies. It's created such a divide between myself and the real world around me that I've become isolated from all normal support networks and communities I've participated with in the past. Many of the people that I work the closest with are other people who live perpetually online, obsessed with their work as well, and relatively isolated from any kind of community or network in their physical world.

Birds of a feather flock together!

I fully recognize and appreciate that this is a big part of the appeal of this technology: it can enable us to form new "network communities" that are not constrained by physical boundaries. It's also the biggest flaw with this technology: it enables us to not push ourselves to stay connected with our immediate environment. What empowers us to connect actually ends up isolating us and keeping us disconnected.

All of that aside, at the end of the day, I simply don't want to be a part of the trading, techy web3 sub-culture. And that is the predominant culture that is pushing blockchain technology right now. And that is exactly why those of us who will never be a part of that culture are slowly being pushed away, back to web2 platforms where we can find topics of our own interest. And yet we're the ones that have all of the 'other' interests that this ecosystem is being built for... supposedly. When people think of crypto/blockchain/web3 all they see is the tech-bro culture that is dominating it. There's nothing wrong with tech-bro culture, other than the fact that it's not opt-in if you want to use this technology.

It's like saying you can't buy a new car unless you're willing to show up to the track every week and do splits on lap times or flush your brake fluid after every trip to the grocery store. In the automotive world they figured out real quick how to get dealerships, mechanics, and other specialty shops in the mix to interface with the public ecosystem instead of having your grandma have to go to the racetrack and talk to the guy selling nitro-boost about her check engine light.

The reality web3 builders don't want to accept is that the rest of the normie world is never going to care about trading, more less the tech that enables it. We won't adopt a million new users until arbitrage, liquidity pools, mev, and all that other technical stuff is hidden away in the background just like air-fuel-ratios, torque management, engine boost, and gear ratios have to be abstracted away for the average driver. Some people will always like getting behind the scenes and understanding what's under the hood, certainly. Trading, however, is the least interesting part of this technology for the vast majority of people and I don't see that ever changing. Tech-bro's keep thinking that the only thing stopping normal people from being the next Wolf of Wallstreet is access to a 24/7 anonymous trading floor.

It's not gonna happen.

As racing continues to be a niche interest, most normies don't even want to think about driving anymore, more less care about what's happening on the track. They'd rather just tell their phone where they wish they were and let some random piece of technology show up and take them there, no further questions asked. Especially if it brings snacks and bottled water.

Nobody cares about trading.

I mean racing.

Ok, there's a decent sized F1 fanbase in most tech circles. I'm sure there are all kinds of racing nerds around tech, quite frankly. It is still, however, a pretty niche interest. In mainstream USA I would also say it's far more common for people to associate racing with the redneck Nascar culture than the svelte European F1 scene. Just watch Talladega Nights and you'll understand where I'm coming from.

Cars mean many things to different people: status, luxury, freedom, adventure, work... but as long as it doesn't break down, makes them look cool, and/or gets them where they need to go, most people don't think twice about their car, more less about why it is able to do what it does. That's for the realm of the 'car nut', and these individuals are generally not known to be well rounded conversationalists; like most nerds.

What's fun to me, as a car nerd who loves automotive history, is how intertwined the racing industry is with the development of the modern car. In the beginning, the early 'stock factory car' was pretty negligent on features. One of the earliest Benz didn't even have brakes! Thank goodness Bertha, Carl Benz's wife and arguably the more important car nerd in the family, actually took the prototype out into the world and interfaced with the public to figure out these important necessities.

Beyond just 'taking it for a spin', we have dozens of essential modern safety features that have come from racing; like in-vehicle tire pressure monitoring, traction control systems, not to mention the performance things like fuel injection and turbo chargers. Even more basic, however, are the simplest seeming safety features like crumple-zones or even simply seatbelts!

Cars used to not come with seatbelts at all, in fact, before laws were enforced to require them. The first significant wave of cars to get seatbelts were taxis, adopted from airplane technology, to keep tourists safer bouncing around NYC. Given the choice, however, people often requested factory installed seatbelts be removed when they purchased a new vehicle. Seatbelts were for nerds!

It was when the Sports Car Club of America started requiring seatbelts in all race cars that the idea started to spread throughout the world that this was a practice that needed to be standardized. Today, seatbelts are estimated to reduce the chance of injury or fatality in a crash by up to 60%. Without the racing industry providing the testbed to develop the cultural acceptance as well as produce the numbers of how effective this safety feature was, people would have continued 'opting out' for potentially many more years (evidenced by the number of people today who still refuse to wear theirs despite the risk of getting fined). Racing has always been good for one certainty: a large volume of high speed accidents with complete video footage of every angle.

The same can be said for a lot of car innovations we all take for granted today: the rearview mirror, anti-lock brakes, regenerative braking and hybrid cars in general... all of these technologies exist because the racing industry poured resources into R&D to develop them.

There was a time when stock car racing culture was so pervasive in the US that car manufacturers had a slogan "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday". Everyone was watching the race track to see which car manufacturer had finally improved on the competition.

And yet... to most people (in the US at least) when they think of racing, this is still what they picture in their mind:

I'll be clear: I think it's perfectly fine that most people don't care about racing. It's a niche thing for nerds, without a doubt!

The salient point, I feel, is the relationship between the nerds and the rest of the world. Without the nerds, we all wouldn't be enjoying cars like we do today. And yet... nobody really has to care about trading, I mean racing, in order to benefit from it!

Yes, you caught me. This is an article about crypto!

I find myself getting more and more disillusioned with "web3 culture" because I think, at the end of the day, I just want to be a normie. I understand the tech and why it needs to exist, but I just don't really care for the culture bubble around it. I think it's because I just want to enjoy the modern car, not build the entire racing industry. This is why I never got into NFT's or any of the other cultural trends over the years. I just observe from the outside, fascinated, yet uninterested.

I have my passions that I nerd out about, but web3 does not really scratch the itch in the same way. Simply because I understand what a decentralized blockchain is and how it works and why it matters doesn't mean I want to constantly think about it or talk to people in my life about it. I rarely bring up my work with people in my personal life, and not because I don't think they'll understand what I'm doing. Not because 'it's too hard to describe'. It's just not interesting to them. It's like working on a Nascar pit crew and expecting people you're having lunch with to want to hear about what torque wrench you use. I'm used to people not being interested in my interests, as a lifetime nerd. I'm practiced at talking about other people's interests in social situations.

Trying to promote this industry has forced be to become so obsessed, however, that I've actually lost interest in most of my other passions and hobbies. It's created such a divide between myself and the real world around me that I've become isolated from all normal support networks and communities I've participated with in the past. Many of the people that I work the closest with are other people who live perpetually online, obsessed with their work as well, and relatively isolated from any kind of community or network in their physical world.

Birds of a feather flock together!

I fully recognize and appreciate that this is a big part of the appeal of this technology: it can enable us to form new "network communities" that are not constrained by physical boundaries. It's also the biggest flaw with this technology: it enables us to not push ourselves to stay connected with our immediate environment. What empowers us to connect actually ends up isolating us and keeping us disconnected.

All of that aside, at the end of the day, I simply don't want to be a part of the trading, techy web3 sub-culture. And that is the predominant culture that is pushing blockchain technology right now. And that is exactly why those of us who will never be a part of that culture are slowly being pushed away, back to web2 platforms where we can find topics of our own interest. And yet we're the ones that have all of the 'other' interests that this ecosystem is being built for... supposedly. When people think of crypto/blockchain/web3 all they see is the tech-bro culture that is dominating it. There's nothing wrong with tech-bro culture, other than the fact that it's not opt-in if you want to use this technology.

It's like saying you can't buy a new car unless you're willing to show up to the track every week and do splits on lap times or flush your brake fluid after every trip to the grocery store. In the automotive world they figured out real quick how to get dealerships, mechanics, and other specialty shops in the mix to interface with the public ecosystem instead of having your grandma have to go to the racetrack and talk to the guy selling nitro-boost about her check engine light.

The reality web3 builders don't want to accept is that the rest of the normie world is never going to care about trading, more less the tech that enables it. We won't adopt a million new users until arbitrage, liquidity pools, mev, and all that other technical stuff is hidden away in the background just like air-fuel-ratios, torque management, engine boost, and gear ratios have to be abstracted away for the average driver. Some people will always like getting behind the scenes and understanding what's under the hood, certainly. Trading, however, is the least interesting part of this technology for the vast majority of people and I don't see that ever changing. Tech-bro's keep thinking that the only thing stopping normal people from being the next Wolf of Wallstreet is access to a 24/7 anonymous trading floor.

It's not gonna happen.

As racing continues to be a niche interest, most normies don't even want to think about driving anymore, more less care about what's happening on the track. They'd rather just tell their phone where they wish they were and let some random piece of technology show up and take them there, no further questions asked. Especially if it brings snacks and bottled water.

Nobody cares about trading.

I mean racing.