The broken promises of neo-leftist crypto

0:00Hey guys, this is Emily here with a subscriber-only episode of The Culture Journalist. So today we are going to sort of go back in time to examine something that some of us in the kind of technology slash culture space may have come into contact with over the last couple of years, and especially maybe starting with the crypto full run during the pandemic, which was leftists who got into crypto or maybe leftists who got like hoodwinked into being into crypto. the side of crypto that sort of made appeals to artists and leftist creatives and kind of got people to pay attention to it maybe even get a little too involved in it this moment that you know some may remember as kind of a wild time others may be remember as sort of a nightmare so today i'm joined by eli zeger who is a technology and music culture writer where are you based?

1:06I'm in Ridgewood, Queens for now. Based in Ridgewood, Queens. And we are here to talk about a really cool article Eli wrote called Owner's Remorse for the publication Strange Matters. How would you describe it, Eli? It was leftists who, yeah, got into crypto and blockchain because there was the bull market of spring, summer 2021. And they kind of got trapped with it, I don't like the word trapped, but like, you know, they stayed within it and still found hope within it in large part because of sort of elite actors like venture capitalists, founders and executives of different sorts of blockchain projects who honestly talked a good, big, compelling game about user ownership, collective ownership and cooperative ownership.

2:00so that's how I would describe it is like you know there's a lot of attention around this technology and what kind of gave it the impression of having staying power was class conscious seeming rich people in the space yeah and this is kind of a phenomenon that I thought it was really important to write about and cool that you ended up writing about because so much of the mainstream media coverage of the crypto space was, well, A, focused on kind of bigger actors like the SPFs of the world, Binance, et cetera, or, you know, Bored Ape Yacht Club, scams. And you sort of zeroed in on this aspect of the 2021 gold rush that has been very overlooked that people might not even be aware of because people tend to think of it as this like purely libertarian space, I'd say.

2:54Yeah. Or scammy space. When did you first start noticing this? The prevalence of Marxist and kind of economically progressive sounding rhetoric in certain corners of the crypto world and the art side of crypto, I guess. What was your path to it? I guess so path to kind of crypto blockchain stuff was 2020. A buddy of mine was like, oh, get on Coinbase. There's potential there. So I was just like, you know, fucking around with investments during that time then even separately like i was getting into exploring like cooperative ownership on the internet because around that time you know it was still covid days so like you know this is a very internet-based phenomenon and like kind of while being on twitter i realized that there was people who saw an intersection between this web3 stuff and web3 refers to kind of the category of blockchain and crypto so people who saw the affinity between web3 and cooperative ownership on the internet So during that time, what the essay is about is how I primarily saw a lot of kind of engagement.

3:56I don't want to say like praise necessarily, but a lot of engagement and a lot of people taking seriously a particular venture capital firm called Variant Fund, who I write a lot about. They're helmed by two people, Legion, Jesse Walden. And I noticed that people who were interested in a cooperatively owned, user-owned internet with the power of blockchain and crypto, they were engaging with Legion and Jesse Walden on Twitter. And most of the time, Legion and Jesse Walden were very interested in engaging back. So what I witnessed was this sort of friendliness and lack of criticality towards venture capitalists.

4:39And yeah, I guess to your point of like this phenomenon going under the radar is to understand like because a lot of the left pushback against Web3 stuff was, oh, it's all just scams. Oh, it's all just bad for the environment. These sort of criticisms that were true in certain aspects were misdefining or kind of like overly defining technology. You know, not all of blockchain is bad for the environment. Not everyone who gets involved is a scammer like SBF. Also, the other thing, his scam had more of a flavor of Madoff than any sort of... He wasn't vitalic or anything. It wasn't something that was endemic to the fact of using cryptocurrency.

5:19It was a scam that could have been done not using crypto, or if you were not involved in crypto. Yeah, exactly. Any sort of nascent technology can be exploited by scammers, and it's not unique to crypto and blockchain. but for most of the people who were critiquing this sort of stuff they were missing the sort of more niche phenomenon of what I'm describing in my essays because you know to understand this niche phenomenon you have to think that there is some sort of promise to blockchain and crypto you have to see how the technology can potentially be good so when you know if one understands that there is some sort of good to blockchain and crypto to stay true to the essence of decentralized technology, it's fucked up to then be engaged in kind of friendly banter and take seriously venture capitalists who are actors committed to centralization.

6:18And that's essentially my argument is, you know, it's irresponsible and it's a bit like self-deluding to engage with actors of centralization simply because they're good at talking about decentralization. In the piece, you call the people that this rhetoric was meant for or who ended up falling for it, blockchain socialists. And you admit that you were one of them. And I maybe was too for a little bit, or at least I was kind of like agnostic about it. But as someone who was like deeply interested in how platforms and like sort of the digital architecture of our lives impacted the economics of art and culture, I was like, well, let's at least see what this technology might have to offer because it's looking pretty bad here with Web 2, which is the thing that Web 3 is rebelling against, I guess.

7:09And you think of like the major, it's big tech, like platforms like Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and maybe even, you know, something like streaming. Yeah. Why do you think a lot of leftists kind of ended up finding this rhetoric so intoxicating, especially during that particular moment in time? And, you know, what are some examples of things that they might have gotten involved with? That's it for the free preview version of this episode. There's lots more ahead. You can get full access by becoming a paid subscriber for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.