Five Years Ago, I Went Full Crypto
I left big-agency life for an in-house role, attempting to divine a modicum of order amid the perpetual volatility and uncertainty of crypto. Here's what I've observed.
Five years ago last month, after more than twenty years in the agency business, I decided to “go in-house” for the first time in my career.
As one colleague put it, this meant that I was probably nuts but at least there was ample proof around me that I wasn’t the only one who was nuts.
This strikes me as a good a time as any to reflect on these last five years during which I have, for the first time, immersed myself in a single — if quite broad — ecosystem.
For the first time, it’s a tech epoch about money itself — As I often point out, money was merely involved in previous eras of tech, supported by flush venture capital, super-low interest rates, macro-economic trends, and more. Crypto was a technology revolution that was, for the first time, about money itself rather than new ways to use the money you have. This attracted some brilliant innovators and, of course, more than a few crooks. It has also exposed legislators and regulators for the dart-throwing rulemakers that most of us have always suspected them to be. And while the crypto industry has done a lot of things that make it easy to ridicule — from Sam’s charlatanism to Bitboy’s buffoonery — we are on-balance pointing to a better way to think about how society and individuals approach money and monetary systems.
Yes, dammit, we are “still in the early days” — “But Satoshi’s whitepaper was published fifteen years ago!” you exclaim. “How can you say crypto is still in its early days?” The crypto/web3 category, with all of its complexity and variation, is just a lot knottier than serving up documents (Web 1.0) or maximizing the Internet’s utility for everyday users (Web 2.0). It involves a fundamental shift in how we think about identity, decentralization, and, yes, money. Figuring that out takes time. Lots of it.
Our ecosystem is in the Jimi Hendrix Zone — New ecosystems need time to find their golden mean. Jimi Hendrix’s solo career was all-too-brief — four studio albums across nearly as many years — and I don’t really believe he ever had the opportunity to find that steady-state between his extremes. When Hendrix was “on,” he was unmatched. Genius. Truly a master of his craft. An inspiration to musicians today, across multiple genres. When he was “off,” he was somewhere between overly self-indulgent and unlistenable. The man had two speeds. A lot of times, I wonder the same about my own industry within this, again, very nascent period. If you consider the complexity of my first two points, it’s clear we have a ways to go along the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing continuum before we fill in the valleys between the peaks.
The blockchain-not-crypto people need to come back — My interest in projects like Chronicled got me into this space. The media-audit-trail project that my previous employer too-gleefully abandoned, Rakonto, was about solving the problem of digital malleability using existing blockchain networks. This was also during the time, circa 2017 - 2018, when the “blockchain-not-crypto” crowd was starting to be seen as hopelessly uncool. It was only much later in my exploration of this technology that I started to understand the economic aspects a bit more. Today, I’m only further convinced that blockchain technology or something a lot like it is the remedy for increased digital uncertainty in an imminently AI-driven world. I don’t think a digital token is strictly necessary to make this happen.
We will know we have succeeded when we’ve become easy to ignore — Shopping for a new dishwasher last week, I was struck by an ad that listed WiFi connectivity equally alongside more mundane features like “extra rinse cycle.” As one wag put it, “The Internet of Things” so widely hyped at the beginning of this century is, today, just “things.” In researching new dishwashers, WiFi connectivity was listed alongside water-saving rinse cycles and expandable top racks. Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a web-based data transport technology of which I was once very (and controversially) fond used to fuel debates about standards and user interfaces. Now it’s the rare person who actually knows they are using web syndication technologies. Likewise, I wonder how my children will look upon the days when people worked with an untrustworthy, infinitely malleable, unaccountable Internet where identity wasn’t self-sovereign.
Where does all this lead? If I had this answer, I’d have a different career and would be writing this from my private island. But industries where I am forced to ask that question daily tend to be my comfort zone.
Recommendations
“My small family spent two years of our lives essentially stateless, stranded at sea, 18,000km from home, floating on 40ft of fiberglass,” intrepid.eth — A harrowing story told by a father in a family of five. While we’re on the topic of statelessness and the anachronism of the nation-state concept, check out the story of my friend Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, and maybe get to know the gloriously quixotic efforts of Liberland and Sealand.
Get Gotti, Netflix — In fiction or otherwise, I’ve always been critical and suspicious of how the entertainment industry depicts Italians. We’re always depicted as joyous buffoons or gangsters. (I have never watched an episode of The Sopranos. The Mario Brothers franchise makes me ill. However, combine the buffoonery with crime and I’m totally on board.) Throat clearing aside, though, I rarely binge-watch anything. This John Gotti docuseries, though? I’m glued.
“I Loved “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Before I Loved Myself,” Electric Literature — This is a timely, unusual perspective on how one movie — even a cheap, gory one — can shape one’s life, relationships, and worldview.
Bottom Story
I’m sorry. I just can’t look away.