The Blockchain Socialists
"It đđđđđ dumb, but itâs đ¤đŚđĄđđŁ smartâ is the slogan of Friends with Benefits (FWB), the organizer of a three-day cryptocurrency conference / music festival that took place last year in Idyllwild, California. I couldn't go because I was getting married, again, that weekend, but I caught the full recap on YouTube. Friends with Benefits calls itself "a new kind of social network made up of creatives and builders who believe in the promise of a better internet."
The festival caught my eye because last year, I wrote a blog called The East Solano Plan about a girl I knew from high school who posted a lot on Twitter about walkable cities. I had gotten interested in urbanism in design school and was jealous of her multi-disciplinary career interests. However, reading my friend's blog, I realized she wasn't just interested in expanding bike lanes and planting trees, but she was actually building a city of her own, near a sleepy village way up in Northern California. Not only that, but she was also involved in a neo-colonial tax dodge and medical experimentation scheme taking place in Latin America, one that is currently bankrupting the country of Honduras. In Silicon Valley, these mini-enclaves are referred to as Network States, coined by investor Balaji Srinivasan, formerly of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and are formally about weakening America's tax power, among other things.
I'd encourage you to read the blog, but if you don't want to take my word for it, Quinn Slobodian gives an introduction to the Silicon Valley fascination with Special Economic Zones and what he calls a "radicalization of neoliberalism into a kind of exoterranism that is a product of a world that we have all collectively helped create over the last 20 years" in detail in his 2023 book Crack Up Capitalism.
As you can imagine, I was surprised to see FWB FEST's manifesto, spelled "MANI.FEST.O," refer to itself as a Temporary Network City. They believe their festival will clarify how network states "could evolve into the creation of new IRL citiesâand even countriesâwith physical territory, sovereignty, and diplomatic recognition." Strange, but FWB isn't your typical community. It's a DAO, short for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a blockchain-based community governed collectively by its members without centralized authority. Membership to Friends With Benefits is "token-gated" and powered by a token called $FWB, which serves as both membership pass and governance tool. It's a lot of crypto babble, but in practice, Friends With Benefits is simple: anyone who pays is granted access to a group chat filled with tech and culture influencers, and once a year, they throw a festival. Their project, however, is a larger one, focusing on "how it might feel to live among a group of people with a collective set of shared ideals."
Crypto isn't just for basement dwellers anymore. Every designer I know has gotten into the racket in some way or another, which is understandable because since the market bottomed out, scams are the only way to make money in product design anymore. I haven't wanted to get into the subject, partly because I'm guilty of occasionally building crypto garbage myself, but mostly, I haven't wanted to hurt anyone's feelings. We all need a dream to get through the day, and some designers, my friends included, have chosen to see potential in Web3 for something larger; used properly, they believe it could be a tool to liberate society from the shackles of our oppressors. I'm serious. But, it wasn't until this year in August, when I looked at photos of these beautiful young professionals gathered for three days of music, ideas & tech, that I started to ask myself why every professional designer I'd ever heard of was a featured speaker, and what precisely these people sitting in the grass under umbrellas, listening to a harpist with a smoke machine could be talking about, and if it was possibly the dumbest, most evil shit you've ever heard of.
For people who know nothing about cryptocurrency, a quick primer: Web3 refers to a model of the internet that would use the blockchain to give users greater ownership over their data. Ethereum is the blockchain that powers this shift, and NFTs are a money-laundering scam where people buy and sell JPEGs that hold speculative value.
I pray that the people attending FEST were only there because the band Perfume Genius was playing that weekend. At these types of events, there is always a mix of characters; some are just there for the ride, while others are there to take you for one, like Anna Gat, a self-described modern polymath who is starting a company called Interintellect based on the idea of reinventing the French Salon. Gatt is a self-described "writer and technologist," "a bookworm, a Girl Scout, a war history buff, a hobby theologian, and a competitive rhythmic gymnast."
Ryne Saxe, another multi-hyphenate "physicist turned coder, turned lawyer, turned founder," spoke at the conference. For an example of the depth of jargon in cryptocurrency, Saxe is the CEO of a company described as: "a modular lending protocol that bridges NFT and FT with DeFi primitives." To translate, his company lets you take out loans leveraging the values of your NFTs as collateral. He used his opportunity on stage, "the vibe is incredible," he says, to unironically ask the question, "what is money?" His answer comes not on the second slide but at the end of his presentation. "We made it up!" he says, "money and currency are their own myths." This is a comically primitive answer from someone designing ways to collateralize lending. If Marx is rolling over in his grave at FEST, he's also the elephant in the room, because in crypto, any conversation about coins always becomes one about the meaning of money, and one thing always leads to another.
I don't just mean Marx's economic ideas but also the tendencies he inspires. At FEST, crypto isn't just a cash grab but part of a process to bring Marxism up-to-date, and model new systems of communal living. Daisy Alioto, a speaker on The Taste Economy, says in an article for the Nation, "Join a union-but also join a DAO." Alioto, who runs a Web3 culture newsletter, says, "DAOs aren't a substitute for the labor movement," but they "can be a powerful tool to fund creative projects together: no banks, no overhead, and no disparities in the geographical ability to participate." She continues, "It's incumbent on DAO evangelists to outline what can be gained. To me, that means cooperation and coexistence between the labor movement and new paradigms of digital work. I think we should all dual-card."
Artist Joshua Citarella delves into these communitarian ideas at his FEST talk on online political extremism. For money, Citarella interviews legitimate people in academia alongside grifters in a compare-and-contrast art project. He is handsome but so self-conscious you can't even look at him through video. Last week, he interviewed Quinn Slobodian, a historian and professor at Boston College who writes dry books about liberalism, and I quoted at the beginning of this post. He also appears frequently on podcasts like The Blockchain Socialist. Citarella politically came of age in the New York City post-recession art scene. When he was first starting, no one had any money. But, over the years, a few of his peers rocketed into financial success while the rest languished at the bottom. He now sees the potential of DAOs to fund and support community projects, so we don't all have to rely on the occasional generosity of benevolent donor organizations.
Citarella's ideas are inspired by left-accelerationist thinkers Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek. Acceleration calls for intensifying capitalistic growth and technological change to destabilize existing systems. The godfather of the movement, a noted amphetamine addict, says, "Nothing human makes it out of the near future." Acceleration will culminate in the "melting of Terra into a seething K-pulp", which, if I can understand, is a kind of goo. Left-acceleration builds on these same principles, but they believe the outcome will instead be very good. Williams and Srnicek think that left-wing politics is ignoring technology that could be exploited to bring Marxism up-to-date. To formalize these ideas, they published the Manifesto #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for Accelerationist Politics. I found a link to it on a site that houses useless internet manifestos, like the Cyberfeminism Manifesto for the 21st Century, which starts, "We are the modern cunt". In a fifteen-point argument, point one begins by rejecting what it calls "folk politics" and "horizontalism." By point fifteen, it reverses its view, calling for an "ecology of organizations" warning us about sectarianism and centralization.
Also speaking, Yale-educated designers David Rudnick and Eric Hu appear for a fireside chat. These days, Rudnick and Hu are known more for their left-tweeting than their design work. They've both recently transitioned from graphic designâthey both produce grungy album artworkâinto the Web3 space. In 2022, Rudnick, an Englishman living in Ghent đŹ, released a book called the Tomb Index. Someone gave me a copy at a conference I attended on "tech optimism". The Tomb Index is shaped like its namesake and weighs several pounds. I dropped it on my hand while rushing out of a hotel room, got a pulsating bruise, and then had to carry that book like an omen on an intercontinental flight.
Explaining your work in the language of Marx is part of the legitimization of design work, and Rudnick does a competent facsimile. He frequently peppers the phrases "use value" and "exchange value" into pre-rehearsed answers about this work, from which he is unable to deviate. The Tomb Index is part NFT project, with each page containing a hand-drawn reproduction of a "mini-disc," part lamentation on the ever-quickening lifecycle of commodities, part exploration of the negative toolsets capitalism enforces. Rudnick bought a $50,000 thousand printer that prints in six colors instead of four to produce this book. He says this adds richness to the tapestry of the NFT. To get a sense of Rudnick's speaking and writing style, an excerpt from the Tomb Index:
"Everything we understand about the world is necessarily drawn from the history of the things that we individually have seen, have read, have experienced. This dataset, memory bank, text repository, is unique to every viewer. It means for a viewer reality is only a quantum projection based on the things they know and remember - making what is remembered or made capable of remembering essential when considering what the possible realities of other viewers will be. I try to parse this subjectivity in terms of what I call narratives; the history of a thing as it exists only to that viewer. A dictionary may present the definition of a chair but what it or technology cannot currently elaborate is your own narrative chair - which consists of every chair you have ever seen and remembered, with a hierarchy unique to you - perhaps weighted heavily by a chair in your bedroom, or your house, that other viewers will be completely unaware of."
Lately, however, the facade is cracking. Rudnick's co-speaker, Eric Hu, is currently in crisis about whether or not Web3 will bring about socialism. A year ago, he collaborated with FWB on a Web3 drink called the "Mateverse," a modern spin on the German drink Club Mate. On stage, Hu, who seems nice (I am sorry), was despondent and almost in tears, saying, "I don't know if technology... what we are doing... is improvements."
"I'm someone who's directly benefited from technology displacing jobs," he says in his talk. He admits that while living in San Francisco, he didn't fully understand the political landscape he was a part of, "I was very much just like 'Bro, tech is good'... I think I realized the hubris of saying that. I was engulfed in the early 2010s into the poptimism of 'Social Networks are going to bring us together' like 'divisions are going to be broken down'. I have only seen so far that people are more entrenched in the things Web2 promised to eliminate. And also, in some ways, we are even worse. We have become much more atomized in our individual thought."
In 2021, he and a friend produced Monarchs, a series of 888 NFTs. Each artwork is a one-of-a-kind programmatically generated picture of a butterfly you can buy (and use it as an asset when you take out a loan). Now, he's started to see Web3 differently. While the promise of decentralization could have led to equality and opportunity, what he's seeing instead resembles just how Web2.0 went wrong, a Wild West of uncharted territory swallowed up by private equity. Of these changes, he says, "I wasn't under the illusion the way I do things was going to exist for the rest of my life... I just didn't think we'd go from me stabbing someone to me getting crushed by a bulldozer."
These sentiments have increased everywhere in the crypto space. The manifesto for ETH Berlin, a conference on cryptocurrency summarizes:
"The situation is dire. We have been operating in crisis mode for years now. Established systems are failing, new and old imperialist powers are throwing continents into wars of attrition, global supply chains are collapsing, financial markets are tumbling, healthcare systems are falling apart, education is on a consistent downward spiral â the list goes on.
But there is hope: The soils to grow new ideas have never been more nutritious. It has never been more urgent to double down on new revolutionary concepts and ideas. It is high time to change the world.
Reflecting on the decentralized ecosystems â the very systems designed to solve some of the underlying problems of the failing society â we realize that instead of creating actionable alternatives, we seemingly are:
- reinvigorating hierarchical power structures,
- setting questionable incentives,
- recreating existing failures,
- and hence, are more and more part of the problem."
While it has always been a valid question to ask whether it is possible to learn anything at Yale Design School, these two make up a case that we should look into that racket much more seriously. The issue with design education today is that no one knows what design is, especially not designers. David Rudnick represents the best designers can come up with, arguing in an hour-long lecture that design is "a practice that demands responsibility." Whatever you want to call it: Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking, Future Design, Ethical Design, etc., designers want to have it all, but design will never escape what it is: a corporate profit-maximizing service. Hu is a quiet tragedyâhe wants to do good but doesnât know how. He doesn't have the education that he should have been able to rely on, thus Web3. Itâs an unfortunate outcome, especially for someone who is, at least technically, among our best and brightest. But this isn't just individual academic failure; it comes from the design of a school curriculum that cannot cope with itself.
Design education is a project shaped by early 20th-century industrialization, utopian thinking, and the belief that a rational, universal aesthetic could be imposed on a world that was anything but. It continued the Enlightenment-driven impulse to abstract, reduce, and systematize. Today, design education trying to reject its industrial origins, pulls from a mix of mid-century critical theory and other ideas from European artistic circles during a time of deep social and political upheaval.
Students today encounter these libertarian revolutionary ideals but in a detached, surface-level wayâMarxism without Marx, Enlightenment without Smith, Kant, Hegel, or Hume, critique without history. Through cultural osmosis, these ideas trickle down and create the "crypto designer", an aesthetic traveler with fantastic clothes who moves through the worlds of design, technology, and speculation, carrying a contradictory mix of utopian idealism and market-driven pragmatism.
Everyone we have spoken about is a scammer, but there is more to this than just crypto optimism, which is an absurd symptom of a problem that plagues legitimate-seeming things. Everyone stopped reading; call it cultural osmosis or canonical drift, our history has flattened into the now, and our cultural output has gone with it. The new trend in design collections of all sorts are enormous, rhizomatic, encyclopedic archives of form â some of which are generated with the friendly assistance of AI. When history is forgotten, all the designer has the the deluge of information that spills out at us every day on the internet to sift through, to categorize, and to pile up in corners to try to make sense of what exactly is happening to us, why we suddenly have no money and no jobs, no time, no hope, no direction. This artistic output is no better than AI slop, and the work is no more thoughtful than our statistics machines that think for us.
We see this eclecticism in our design tools. It should surprise no one that Charles Broskoski, co-founder of the design platform Are.na, also spoke at FEST. Are.na, described as a Pinterest for designers, is a "toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old" and an "internet memory palace," a cabinet of curiosities. Compared to the others, his talk was relatively philosophy-light and aptly named Here For The Wrong Reasons. People use Are.na to archive internet junk, and to temperature check trends while moodboarding at work. One user is using it to build a studio, writing, "Think of it as Mckensey but with a soul and based on matriarchal values." I have a folder on mine of Snapchat screenshots and another of close-ups of my closet. I won't go as far as to say that websites like that dictate culture, but they are part of a mass process of archiving our junk in a kaleidoscope of different forms to find something new to see. Lenin spoke of this kind of eclecticism:
"... in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, if not more often, it is the idea of the 'withering away' that is placed in the foreground. Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism - this is the most conventional and widespread phenomenon in present-day official social-democratic literature in relation to Marxism. Such a substitute is, of course, no novelty; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. With the fraudulent substitution of opportunism for Marxism, it becomes the very easiest way to deceive the masses by substituting eclecticism for dialectics. This gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all tendencies of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, and yet, in reality, it presents no integral and revolutionary understanding of the process of social development at all."
In his talk Body Futurism, Toby Shorin, hailed like some God, pauses thoughtfully while scanning the room and nods his head every few lines for dramatic effect. At FEST, Shorin is the quasi-headliner after a slam dunk talk a few years back called Life after Lifestyle. Life after Lifestyle is about how brands are good because they teach authority. In his essay, Shorin says, "If people could unironically like brands now, maybe in the near future, they would be comfortable opting into a culture premised on collectivity rather than individualism. Perhaps they would be okay letting someone convince them of what is good, of what a right way of life is."
In interviews, Shorin is frequently referred to as one of the most exciting thinkers of his time, which he responds to with a humbled thanks that worries me in the way that I fear for Timothee Chalamet's soul whenever he walks into a room filled with women. Frequently in interviews, I catch Shorin referring to himself as a philosopher, like the kind that existed in olden times. When I wrote The East Solano Plan, Shorin had just given up trying to convince people that if crypto was going to be a tool for good, they would need to develop standards of ethics, and was on an airplane back from Vitalia, the life-extension conferences on the island of Prospera, the tech tax-dodge colony in Honduras. His pessimism has only grown in recent months, answering the question posed to him last week "is the social layer even capable of holding people accountable?" in the negative. After some pleading, I had Dani read his article, called Squad Wealth. Squad Wealth is about how individualism is terrible, but so are corporations, so you should form mini-communes to hoard money with just your bros. "It is like a high schooler wrote this," Dani said, shaking her head over and over while reading it and mumbling the word "sad." Then, she showed me a screengrab in the article depicting an increase in Google searches of the word "squad," which he points to as a sign of our growing class consciousness.
Squad Wealth was more than just a blog post, it was a movement. Of the phrases longevity, Shorin says, "If you search the term "squad wealth" on Twitter, you still see people mentioning it, discovering it, and feeling just as galvanized as they were when it came out, even though that cultural moment of it being Defi Summer and, you know, WAGMI and bags go up and stuff is long over. And I think that's because the underlying moral dimension of it is still on point. People are still trying to get out of that paradigm. They're still trying to find a form of communion and collectivity that feels right, that feels good."
After moving away from cryptocurrencies, Shorin now considers the body the basic political unit. "Trauma release, sperm rates, longevity protocols, gene therapies, mystical statesâwith the shattering of software-based utopias, the body has become the premise for all new cultural developments," he says in Body Futurism. In 2024, Shorin read the book The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, and he now believes that the chaos we are witnessing is the death knell of the Western world. You might not know that our renewed interest in the body â sauna, all-meat diets, homesteading, yoga, not vaccinating our kids, etc. only means one thing: we are returning to our placenta. The West is dying, and we will be reborn into a second world. He says bleakly, "Don't be stuck in the world that's ending." For those concerned, Shorin knows his influence is teetering on cult leader status, but he keeps a clear head. Heed his warnings, though, because last week, he said, "Everything is playing out exactly as I imagined."
Shorin is hard (for me) to ignore because he is right. Maybe we should all go in the sauna more. Maybe the Western world is dying. Maybe crypto people should develop a standard of ethics. He is a semi-prolific and semi-competent writer, no small feat. He's read a few good things even though he falls into the hole that every designer on the planet seems to be in, which he has never read anything written before 1900, leaving him without an education. He is deeply pessimistic, finding refuge in books that found a ready audience with Germans of the Weimar Republic disillusioned by the apparent failure of liberal and progressive ideals. To me, that is the only possible explanation on how someone could write articles like Squad Wealth and Life After Lifestyle. If all we have is "brands", it makes sense that's where we would place our faith. It's a confusing mess and one that I find relatable. Watching the American Empire get picked for scrap parts has left me constantly raving to anyone who will listen about the male fascist obsession with horses, Nazi scientists in America, Mao's road to power, and what it all means. Decline has left a deep impression has on our cultural psyche. Still, I think we should be concerned that this is our new intellectual top brass, the squads of the new internetâchampioning an ideology so saturated with contradictions its purpose is lost, while the rest of us spiral out looking at the mess they created.
Signing off at FEST, an exasperated Eric Hu says, "On the way up here I was watching the clouds cast a shadow on the San Bernadino mountains like a quilt. I'm looking at the same things that a person in Neolithic times also saw. And I'm having the same kind of experience of the sublime. The world is big, and it's infinite... We have been around for millions of years and we have survived so many other catastrophes. I think we can survive this as long as we don't forget we also have each other." A beautiful sentiment. Hu pauses and looks down at the floor and for a second I think he's making progress. But, ever the optimist, he takes a breath and doubles down, "What I am cautiously optimistic for with AI is if the tools are evenly distributed.... "
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