Bob Summerwill: Tribalism in the Crypto Space (EthCC 3)

Transcript

tribalism is a manifestation of our animal defaults yes thinking that and that we need to be bigger and better and we need to be aware of it and we need to find our base instincts essentially I'm here with Bob summer will who's been on the podcast before and so welcome to welcome to the booth thank you very much and so you you were just giving a talk about you know something that we we all sort of notice and have to live with although some of us don't like it other other others feed

on it but it is tribalism in this in the crypto space and I'll give you a little anecdote so over sort of December in January I not intentionally but just because I was busy doing other things I kind of like dropped Twitter for like a month and a half and then when I came back when I opened Twitter again or reinstalled it on my phone and I started looking at you know just kind of scrolling through I was like you know I already I already want to leave again just because the level of dialogue often is it's it's very yeah it's very animalistic as you were just pointing out before we start recording so yeah

what's your take on what's going on in the in a secret system and you know I guess is this something I haven't really paid attention this but is this something that we see in other tech industries like this is so much tribalism and I don't know JavaScript development from framework development well I mean I you know you do get a little bit of that in in other technologies fields you know like a a very renowned thing in software development is you know your tabs versus spaces one of the things that I was mentioning today was if you look at the the article on Wikipedia about in-group out-group dynamics there's research that shows that people can form in groups

within minutes on things as trivial as preferences for different types of paintings so I think I think really what you have is we are social irrational emotional creatures and we may be delude ourselves a little bit in blockchain that you know this is this is rational science and you know that we are building this technology and that social factors don't play into this and you know sort of the I don't like politics kind of mindset we're really well politics is people you know see you

you're basically second you don't like people which is true for a lot of people you know I think there is a large chunk of of people within blockchain or within any frontier technology who are I mean you know introverted you know just leave me to do my work kind of people I mean something that I said in my talk is that neurotypical people would would not have been involved early on with the frontier technology like like blockchain you know it is not normal or a typical person what is a neurotypical person well you know so I mean neuro a typical is you

know autism depression anxiety you know egotism narcissism all of all of these sort of characteristics I mean that that essentially you know it's the crazy people well you know the crazy people are the people that invent the new stuff because they do things which are not the norm you know if you are a in quote normal person well would you leave a good playin job at a large corporation that gives you good benefits to go off on some wacky adventure to try and build blockchain you know a thing which may or may not even work may be illegal well no on proneural people have got that same kind

of characteristic you know I think this is a thing which is straight from our biology is you need them the the main members of the tribe and you have a small number of people who have got different kind of characteristics you know they are leaders they are explorers and scouts and inventors and you know they they do not maintain the norm you know if you're following the norm you are not going to be the person that invents a new thing so what you really have I think is is looking back to the beginnings you know to the the genesis kind of group of people either within a theorem or within blockchain as a whole

they're not typical people of course they're not typical people and that works great at the start but it doesn't scale you know when you get to the point that we're out now where you're really looking at mainstream adoption you need a very different kind of characteristic of people all of the other job families which are not being a software engineer have got merit those are useful things but that that's a different kind of culture than you had at the start you know it's it's a very natural thing if you've been involved with something from the very start to say well look it's not the same as the old days you know this is all getting watered down all these

people they don't understand that they don't you know they're not you know they haven't got the same beliefs or the same priorities as me in there that they're they're spoiling it they're stealing it they're co-opting it so I mean I think that that's that's the route to some of the tribalism is is just that that you have people in leadership sorts of positions who are you know they're defensive of their territory and of their view of what's right and wrong and that they do view alternate projects you know you have this this sort of language of all it's an attack you know you're an idiot it'll never work you know it's a

scam so how do we get anything done because you know that the the idea that you know something starts with maybe a group of people and then those group of people have shared values shared ideas shared vision and then as things start to grow then you have more and more people joining that group you know it could be for crypto it could be for anything then those ideas might start to shift might be you know perverted in in someone's eyes or whatever but you know for just about anything else well those people can break off and go and do something else and you know network effects and it will will will make it so that certain projects are or certain ventures are

more successful than others for something like crypto when there's just like so much value one like so much value with you know actual value within the network's themselves if it's so easy to fork and there's are so much incentive to to you know capture value in another chain how do you get anything done and I think that is where it does different from something you know like your JavaScript example is you have that same characteristic for any open source project you know that say say Linux so you've got all of the different Linux distros and you know you've got your a bun to people or your Debian people or what have you you know where you have got a similar characteristic I guess if well look you're all sort of trying to

do the same thing but you know you have a preference or you have an opinion and so on but the difference I'd say and a key reason why there is such a heightened rhetoric within blockchain is because there's money at stake you know you've got bag holders it's not like well okay you go and my open-source project and you have to maintain it yourself and that's fine it's like no no you're stealing money or you're you know you you you you have this if if you were a bag holder you're obviously massively incentivized to talk your to talk your shop and and to portray and any you know any other variants about any other Forks

of that as you know is the most horrific you know attack and betrayal and you know throw these people into the fire you know how dare you do this I guess the distinction with with Lennox - is that all these distributions use the same kernel or the same architecture I think I'm not a the operating system expert by any means but they they use a common kernel that means that they're still compatible anyway like you know your your your your software that runs on Debian will run on Ubuntu or pretty you know pretty much will give you take a few I mean yeah generally means you know you do end up having you know Forks of the of the kernel itself you know and some of the stuff is getting resolved

back and some isn't I mean the worst case of that is Android so the the Linux kernel within Android is very very different to Desktop Linux right basically again it's incentives is that you have a load of profit driven you know companies which are making Android devices and they they don't you know they don't give a toss about the Linux philosophy that they're just profit chasing companies so they are not collaborating in the same kind of way but but yeah I mean there is a unique kind of profit motive around that public you know just rhetorical crap to be honest and I think a lot of that comes

from as the number of people involved has grown you do have more and more of the people and not actually have they haven't actually got any steering power whatsoever like I remember at the start on aetherium basically everyone was on the are aetherium subreddit you know basically everyone working on clients working on projects they were all on there you kind of knew all of the people and all of the projects right it was small enough that you could keep that in your head you know it was it was under your Dunbar number you know if you know your hundred people you probably know most of them right so you're are all kind of in that same kind of tribe but then as that grew to you know hundreds

and thousands of people and crypto Twitter and so on by default the absolute vast majority of those people all they've got as their coins right they're not actually doing any development you know that they like being able to impact the protocol or a client or anything is like a world away from what they can do so they're basically sports fans right they're like I'm an aetherium fan and all they can do is cheer for their heroes and boom for the villains you know it intrinsically descends into this zero-sum game of well my coin and my people you know they're geniuses and

you guys you know you're all idiots and you know that that's the level that you descend to basically because that's all you can do you can just you're just sitting and huddling and you're hoping your thing number goes up I'm curious what kind of lessons we can learn from you know people that do kind of advocacy work outs integers like for things like political issues I'll give an example I think I heard a podcast once where there was this group of people that were you know basically lobbying for something like gay marriage in the US or something that and and their their strategy for getting a very conservative people on

board was to try to find commonalities right like outside of this thing that you we don't agree with let's find the sort of common bonds between us that you can relate to me you can relate to me and sort of what I'm going through and then understand why like it's important for my group of people to like get this thing which in their case was gay marriage what it what is it in crypto like what what it what are the align the things that we can all align on yeah if any that that might help you know attenuate some of this tribalism yeah like stripping toxic I think that's a

that's a great kind of line of thought which is really that to my mind the thing which binds so much of the space together is really about trust minimization and the reason that that's important is because of human psychology you know that that we have got our our base biological instincts our zero-sum my you know my tribe your tribe my people your people and what that has meant throughout the history of humanity or indeed I think for all like living species is really like being

selfish is the winning strategy you've got limited resources and it is my food give me my food my food my food go away away because if you didn't do that you would die it's very very stark zero-sum game and you know that is your Darwinian nature red in blood and claw greedy's good mentality is seeing the whole of our life as this zero-sum game of raw competition but the thing is we passed that you know the world has got abundant

resources you know we are living like kings of the past but the thing is we're still wired we're still wired for that for that zero-sum thinking right and I think many of the the problems that we have within our whatever our political structures and our organizations are that things are still wired for that right you're still looking to the leader you know everyone is is is is kind of like hardwired for looking for a leader right you know that the majority of people are just looking for the best leader to like lead the group right they're not looking to leave themselves

the majority of people are followers and so they look for leaders but what you have which to me is the absolute like genius of blockchain is that we've we found a way to tap those that that selfish motive in a positive some way right you know that we we have this this magical ability to say well look you you don't have to trust each other you can trust the math you know you can trust the game theory and what would previously be a zero-sum game well look we can whatever we can put down deposits or staking or we can do you know we can play a game so

that even prisoner's dilemma bit can become a we can know that we've we put down deposits and you'll be slashed or whatever if you if you choose and and that we can we can set up collaborations where you can work with people even if you deeply distrust them or even hate them you can still set up positive some games where collaboration is the winning move so I mean I think I think that's that's the key piece that that that binds everyone within the whole ecosystem is saying well do you want to build trust minimization systems do you

want to get to a world where people are not going to be living in fear I mean being coerced it's it's easy to say that I think people like the very definition of trust minimizing systems in this very sort of even limited space which is that the entire crypto industry people have different definitions for what trust minimizing systems should be or are and I mean I get what you're saying but I don't think this is gonna go away I think it's gonna get worse III don't have a whole lot of optimism for for the the sort of tribalism and maximalism and and all this stuff to go away I think

it's getting better and worse at the same time so say within this aetherium ecosystem for example speaking now versus when I spoke two years ago you have a massive raft of l2 technologies that have come to fruition right so all of a sudden the the old thought that you had of saying well if you can scale aetherium right you know even if you can get to f2 and you know we can have something that's like aetherium but with more throughput well there you go that's the answer to everything and I think that narrative is unraveling a little bit because you've you've got all of these alternate l2s and then you're thinking well well actually maybe one size does not fit all and you have got all of these different

flavors and it's not like one chain to rule them all I mean I think that's that's that's the false kind of thinking that has been the core of a lot of this tribalism from the very start is is thinking well because of network effects you can only have one winner right so it's so then you end up with your Bitcoin maximalism or you end up with your well yeah but the theorem is gonna flip in Bitcoin and Bitcoin will die or no you guys who you know if theorems rubbish anywhere you need EOS because EOS can scale today or Tron you know and all of these different thoughts that doesn't have to be a single answer you

know and I think there's a lot more acceptance of that now so SEC take its take a theorem classic you know on it's on its own maybe two three years ago you know 2016-2017 it's like a theorem classic dirty look at you you know protest coin it's just you know you're just Bitcoin as you missed out and you know there's it's just it's an attack and you're just doing it for the money and all of this like you know that that's completely faded away right now and and I also see a lot more appreciation of Bitcoin within the etherium group as well right we're not

so long ago it would be this straight zero-sum thinking you know Bitcoin is already obsolete and you know you can do a you know aetherium is a superset of Bitcoin and you know there will come a flipping in a flippin pointment than the network effect narrative dies and Bitcoin dies yeah and like that's people are not generally thinking that now so I think that's good I'm not following the right people on Twitter No well I think this is it honestly if you a lot of it is is where you get your news from and you see this in the in the broader world you know that the news media is obviously motivated to do

clickbait t horror stories oh isn't everything terrible look at this bad thing that happened right because that's what gets them views because they're chasing views and eyeballs and money have you seen like hands Rosling mind the gap kind of stats or whatever so he's a guy in there's there's this thing called Gapminder foundation and what they're doing is they're doing statistics on the world you know on poverty and illiteracy and average income and so on and the story is if you look at the world on average everything is getting better like we're heading to a better in a better place but that's not the narrative you'd think you know

be afraid of terrorism everything's going to you know that that's what you would think is the truth if you if you listen to the mainstream media but that's really just because that's what sells the ads but but you know the truth of saying well look you've actually probably had it better than any generation in history and it's getting better and better and you know and there's there's there's more and more educated people and and and less and less poverty and and so on like that doesn't sell papers yeah what sells papers is be afraid live in fear coronavirus absolutely yeah um you know so say terrorists or antivirus is good business for journalism what well it is and I mean and that's not to say it's

not a real risk however you see stats saying you're more likely to die of a jellyfish sting than you are of terrorism but but you know that doesn't stop trillion dollar spending on on that or war on drugs obviously a massive failure you know be afraid be very afraid but you know we get unused through whatever filter we get it and that is more and more controlled that filter so what what advice would you give to people in the crypto space who are mindful of this because you know you at the outset you you have to be mindful of this to begin with yes and there are people there are people who are not mindful of this and who will never be never be probably right but but you know to people who are minding their

maximalism or their tribalism what what advice would you give to sort of people on it you know the community in general well try and withhold judgment because you know the fact is you probably haven't got all the information if somebody who is seemingly an intelligent kind of person is saying something that you get triggered by or you think no way you know don't don't like shout at them straight away because you probably don't know you know really like I just urge withholding of judgment and attempt to try to understand their perspective that really and you don't have to agree with

them yeah don't ever have to think that you have to like resolve this into a single answer a single universal truth through a single to rethread because you know you you cannot ever do this right I guess this is the essential problem of politics is say take United States here you go you have 300 million people or however many live in the US you have something which is the size of a continent is it conceivable that any single policy is going to make that group of people all happy it's an impossible task coming up with a single policy a single set of rules which is going to you know make all of those things happen you know is it ever feasible but whatever some

southern racist is is ever gonna gleich become by our with some urbanite trans woman like it's not gonna happen so you know you can't resolve these things but equally like you don't have to hate anyone but I think you you can and it come it comes back to finding commonalities between people right also you know let's let's be clear I think a lot of this is accentuated by a large a large part by by by just the the means of communication that we have which is the internet which literally its distance between people yeah I mean I I'll give an example I went to the

scaling Bitcoin conference in Tel Aviv late last year and I hadn't been to a Bitcoin conference since 2014 I think my my mind was set up for I don't want to say confrontation but my mind was set up for you know cuz epicenter is a little you know we do more we do less coverage of Bitcoin and more so of like other than network so we try to sort of like spread it out a bit and I was set up for people to maybe like attack me physically but like you know yeah a time of that blocked chat agnostic position that we that we have and everybody was

super nice you know because we're talking yes and and you know when you're speaking with people face to face it's it's much it's much harder to shout at them or to like throw sarcastic emojis at them or yeah and I mean I think that is an absolute truth as well is you know when you're sitting behind a keyboard where you can say anything right you you are not aware of social cues you don't necessarily have your best behavior on you might be grumpy and you just know it's a lot harder to have that kind of adversarial position when you are face

to face and I mean I think you know that's one can you imagine if the interactions that we have on Twitter we've like for one day we would just have those same interactions and purr and you'd get arrested you would get arrested and dragged to jail yeah you know so I mean I think this is why conferences an especially like community conferences like FCC are so important is that when you are actually face to face people and you know and it's at a small enough scale where it is like feasible to like talk to most of the people you know like a sec here there's you know there's there's not a gigantic number of people and you here for several days you know it's quite possible that you're

gonna have time to talk to you know most of most of the people that you would like to talk to to actually you know talk to speakers to talk to the developers yeah talk to the people that are building these things and and get beyond me well I'm you know I'm I'm an aetherium fan on Twitter and I've been following your things but I don't I don't understand what you mean about this certain the other and actually have that conversation I mean that's that's invaluable and and really getting beyond the you know you're just shouting past each other you're talking past each other and you're you're really just having these rhetorical arguments they're not discussions you know you're not getting to greater knowledge you

just trying to make points you're trying to win and I think that's a key thing is is like it isn't about winning because it's not zero-sum like do not seek to win an argument seek to understand the other person's perspective and you don't have to agree with them but you know that that really I think is is to my mind what I would like to see from people who are aware of these dynamics and and do want to have a better caliber of discussion is you know just stop trying to win and seek to understand please let's do more of that and I see and I do see more of that happening I

really do great but from a certain set yeah but you also do have a lot more trolly aggressive horrible your things a coin you're an idiot stuff going on and I think really that some of that is is just a characteristic of the forms of media that we have Twitter reddit slack's discord you've effectively got zero cost for creation of accounts mmm you know so you will get sock puppets you will get astroturf furs you will just get people who are just being a dick because you can you know you just make a new account and turn up and you

just you know seek to make a mess just because it's fun you know and there will be more and more of that something that Donald MacIntyre has said a number of times is given the amount of money at stake here you're going to have social attacks you're going to have trolling you're gonna have all of this and some of it is just people being poorly behaved bass interesting people but you also will have a degree which is organized opposition it is like paid trolling and attacks like I saw um you see all of the stuff with the u.s.

elections 2016 steering Russia you know all of that stuff like that stuff is happening in blockchain yeah paid troll factories you know that people are paying people to attack you know and you you see whatever your XRP army and all of these things it's like some of it is just people who are just like literary being well I'm they're cheering for their team and they you know they think they're doing good but but you have got you know paid people that are just sewing you know sewing nonsense yeah less winning more understanding that's that's a good piece of advice I

think that we can all try to you know to live by thank you thank you [Music]