The future needs to be fun.
Don’t ya think?
Not long ago we were promised flying cars and shoes that laced themselves up. Yet we live in a world where we’re fed smug Ted Talks about self-help instead.
Meanwhile, in between being told the world is boiling and feeling helpless because the world is boiling, we’re inundated with reminders of what we don’t have and we’re preached at by digital *saviors* as if we’re their congregation.
In far too many ways, we kind of are.
We’re numb to the point of emotionally impotent. That’s thanks to endless ‘breaking news cy- cles’ from corporate media and corporate influencers. We’re constantly looking for ways to es- cape our lives rather than live them. At this point, who wouldn’t? The last year wasn’t the prob- lem; it’s a multitude of problems — one of which being that at some point corporations and politicians realized that the illusion of change was far more beneficial to their wallets and status than change itself.
No wonder we’re searching for saviors, like the ones that present Willy Wonka tickets to the promised land, or in Elon’s case, Mars.
Add on Zuckerberg’s campaign to own the metaverse, which should scare us more than it does. (But again, it’s hard to feel anything when my emotional baseline resembles an apathetic insert [your libido here].)
So just when we’re trying to catch our collective breaths in the midst of a pandemic caused by a virus and its entourage of variants that literally can take your breath away, we have words like ‘blockchain’, ‘NFTs’ and ‘cryptocurrency’ busting through our walls like the Kool-Aid man.
For the record, I’m not advocating for cryptocurrency (often conflated with blockchain; not the same), but lending my perspective based on what I understand about why people might be at- tracted to all things block-crypto-Ts.
Let’s take it all the way back to the big bang — the 2008 economic one.
For the dependently wealthy and fortunate few who have prospered since, everything has been fine. Don’t let the shiny legends around Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk distract you. Those few have so much compared to the majority of people who today have so little.
The norm for too many became to take on more than one job. To sacrifice your most valuable commodity (ie time), and for the benefit of companies that appropriated imagery of its workers for PR headlines.
‘The American Dream’ is the best ad campaign ever created because depending on the color of your skin, your socioeconomic background, how you identify or any other multitude of things that predominantly white men can find a way to discriminate against you with, ‘The American Dream’ is a hollow myth.
So what does this have to do with blockchain?
Currently, there are new deities popping up all over the world claiming “BLOCKCHAIN SAVES.”
They then peddle out their own algorithm, token or NFT, just as any good preacher of a religion does, and asks people to invest their faith. Because if the world is powered by currency, then currency is powered by faith — and by that logic, we’re still only at the dawn of a new religious war.
Every currency and financial institution (crypto companies included) will be asking you to invest your faith and your time in them. They’ll speak to you about their product and how revolution- ary it is, hoping that in between esoteric techno-jargon, the masses will just go along with what they’re saying.
And that, right there, is the achilles heel. The techno-jargon for techno-jargon’s sake.
We live in a world where more people connect with a meme currency and meme stocks not because they understand how blockchain or crypto or the stock market functions, but because they understood the idea. They understood it made them laugh and that their friends liked it.
If there’s one thing we can learn from our original religious institutions it’s that make the idea so good people don’t won’t care about the product. In advertising it’s your typical brand equity v. product equity.
So who’s doing it well?
The gamers!
Gaming companies are popping up left, right and center.
They are all offering a similar thing: a playable wallet. Just invest your time and currency, and you’ll get real interest aka real currency.
So on behalf of all the kids that were ever told to stop playing video games, and then felt like they missed the boat on esports, may I just say SIGN. ME. UP.
We’ve gone through a pandemic, the office as we knew it is dead and people would rather try their luck on a game that exists on blockchain that gives them more money than at said office that’s attempting to reassert dominance over their lives and force them to attend church again. (I’m mixing metaphors, but you get the idea).
This is the new world order.
This is a takeover from a liquiid collaborator
Matt A. Cruz — Less ath, more leisure.
