A popular narrative goes like this: web3 is a grift. The whole thing’s a Ponzi scheme. My complaint with this narrative isn’t that it fails to appreciate the real value hiding among the froth. It’s that it fails to engage with the economic insecurity that drives people to trade their life savings for crypto—that is, for the possibility of a different life.
Totally with you in recognizing the conditions that lead people to yearn for a way out or a way through a precarious situation. But this does not mean that the fantasies and yearnings will come true. If anything, an environment where the status quo is failing many is likely to lead to abuses and wild speculations which do not bear fruit, as people are easier to take advantage of when they are desperate.
My initial and preliminary reading of blockchain and web3 is that it is a symptom of a lack of social trust, and a feeling of impotence and helplessness when compared with a society where existing linkages between industry and political power create winner take all dynamics. We can fantasize all we want about disruption to the status quo via blockchain, but it seems to me to be a poor substitution for the political struggle needed to make the political and economic system response to human and biosystem values, and not just the value of dollars and the powerful.
In the end, the flourishing of a blockchain in a society that presents a very high degree of corruption and capture is likely to reproduce these dynamics of domination, but through slightly different means. Thus, while I think experimentation is interesting and we should continue it, not at the expense of the basic struggle for the incumbent systems in economy and government. We should try to express many of these values into the likely monetary and political systems that are likely to persist.
Hi Nick,
Totally with you in recognizing the conditions that lead people to yearn for a way out or a way through a precarious situation. But this does not mean that the fantasies and yearnings will come true. If anything, an environment where the status quo is failing many is likely to lead to abuses and wild speculations which do not bear fruit, as people are easier to take advantage of when they are desperate.
My initial and preliminary reading of blockchain and web3 is that it is a symptom of a lack of social trust, and a feeling of impotence and helplessness when compared with a society where existing linkages between industry and political power create winner take all dynamics. We can fantasize all we want about disruption to the status quo via blockchain, but it seems to me to be a poor substitution for the political struggle needed to make the political and economic system response to human and biosystem values, and not just the value of dollars and the powerful.
In the end, the flourishing of a blockchain in a society that presents a very high degree of corruption and capture is likely to reproduce these dynamics of domination, but through slightly different means. Thus, while I think experimentation is interesting and we should continue it, not at the expense of the basic struggle for the incumbent systems in economy and government. We should try to express many of these values into the likely monetary and political systems that are likely to persist.
What do you think?