DAPPCON 2025: Crypto culture and its discontents - Naomi Oba

Transcript

And yeah, welcome everybody to this talk to web3 privacy. Thanks for having me and thanks for telling me 10 days in advance with care that I'm going to be expected to do a talk. I thought I'm just sitting here and chilling, but yeah. Anyway, so the fear of public embarrassment is always great to get me to do and I did. And the title is a not to Sigman Freud and if you've read Civilization and its discontents then great. If not, you can still fix it. So yeah, let's get into it. Um, so maybe one of the reasons I'm good at roasting the space is that I grew up in a way that imbued me very deeply in culture.

As you can see, I was put on the guitar when I was very young and my parents were always poor. So I got to learn how to appreciate things that money cannot buy. And so that made me a bit of a culture afficionado if you want. And I even went as far as quitting a management studies to study linguistics where everybody then asked me okay what are you going to do with that and well I ended up in crypto. So nobody could have expected that not even myself. And after six years in crypto I have a lot of gloomy thoughts and ideas and sometimes I think maybe I should just quit and all of this will go away. Um but for now I'm trying to speak up and find people who

have the same kind of feeling about this industry and I think a reason is that we have built a culture that's not very healthy for us and yeah so what is crypto culture what's the first associations you have when you think about it I mean some people probably think of Bitcoin and if you ever meet a Bitcoin maxi or you've been at a Bitcoin meetup you probably don't feel intrigued to investigate this industry any further. Some people might be thinking of going to the moon. What they're doing there, nobody knows. Um, some people might think about the associations with Elon Musk and Doge. Some people might think we are kind of like the sheep

stuck in the bucket, mistaking the echo from it for further encouragement. And then there's this anthropological experiment I'm running on my hinge profile where my most irrational fear is crypto bros. And interestingly the most common response is this is not irrational fear at all. So crypto bros are feared everywhere. And then there's this thing we have and that's our obsession with rockets. And I thought we are over I thought we are over this but somehow I searched for rockets on Twitter and I found plenty of recent tweets with quite a lot of engagement too. And yeah, it

doesn't take a analysis degree to figure that one out. Um especially to the guys. I don't know if you should be so obsessed with a phallic object. Just think about it. Um, but yeah, let's uh get a bit more serious about diagnosing what's happening here. If we put our industry culture on the couch at the therapist, what would they say? Maybe something like number must go up. Everything will and should be tokenized, even your mom, because how else can you value something if it's not on chain and put up for the free market forces to do its thing? And then there's the people who are not even concerned with humans anymore and they just care about billion

of agents. So yeah, that's that's where we're at. And I think all of this is a worldview I would coin as positivism where everything can and should be measured in ways that we perceive to be objective. And there comes a little sociology detour. Does anybody know who this guy is? No. Okay. I'm not surprised because humanity is authorally lacking in crypto. So this is August Comp, the guy who gave sociology its name and he also coined the term positivism which is a worldview that says that all knowledge is either true or positive and can be proven to be so through science or

through direct experience. And he came up with the idea that society develops in three stages. The first theological where you believe in divine forces and then eventually we got science. We started measuring and explaining things that way and then eventually he thought we would come to a phase where everything is explained by science and it would have a integral function in society. Interestingly though he kind of changed his mind towards the end of his life. He was disillusioned with this idea and he thought that what maybe society actually needs is a new kind of religion and conveniently he imagined himself to be the leader of that

religion and the reason I'm mentioning that is because I feel like certain crypto leaders are kind of going through the same transition. Um but yeah moving on like how how does this express itself? I think all his numbers is a good summary of that. And if you don't know me, you've never seen me, and you're trying to figure out whether you should pay any attention of what I have to say in crypto, the instinct would be to check my numbers, my followers, maybe the NFTs I hold, maybe how much money I have in my wallet that's associated with my ENS. Um, and yeah, but of course the question then is, do you actually get a sensible

picture? I don't think so. Nevertheless, in crypto, we often reduce everything just to numbers. Um, and yeah, I think what this has given us is a sort of crypto positivism and beautiful products such as Galaxy. Has anybody here run a Galaxy campaign before? Yes. How did it go? Fair enough. Okay, fair enough. Okay, so you run a galaxy campaign not necessarily for like quality engagement or for real humans to become a long-term believer in your product. You do it to farm the numbers.

And then the most recent iteration of that is of course this entire infoi matter where at times it is good at uh differentiating signal from noise but often it isn't. And it just further amplifies the noise. And if anybody here is playing music, you know that a crescendo that goes on forever just doesn't exist. And we've seen this. First we had Kaio, then we had Loudio, and it's just yeah downhill from there. And then of course the most reductionist thing we do is just reduce everything to token price. And if you can't be asked to do your research as you're supposed to, the thing to do is just look at the price chart. If the price is going down,

this project is probably a scam and it is fair to call the founder of Raga. If the price is going up, this is a totally futurep proof project and totally worth your entire life savings. That's kind of the research process. And another thing this has led to, this obsession with number is that we need to grow the number at all cost at any time. Because if the only thing you measure is the number, the second they're not going up anymore, you're kind of stagnating and not making any progress. And so we have things like Worldcoin where they onboard people. Sometimes they know what they're signing up. Many times they're not necessarily familiar. And sometimes there are people in the global south who

got offered $2 to scan their eyeballs and then some white person in the global north is buying their identity to do stuff with it like farming the world coin rewards. Um then there's also of course this phenomenon whenever a new L1 launches and you've never heard of them but somehow all the VCs are invested in them and they also somehow have 300,000 users out of nowhere. And of course the number is always going up for some weird reason. That's another example of that because why measure quality if you can measure numbers. And then of course there's the entire wash trading thing that has been a problem ever since this industry started. But good news we are

rebranding this to aic trading so it doesn't matter anymore. Um so yeah what's the problem with that? Um, Huxley once said, positioning himself against the positive is that if you go never want to go beyond fact, you only go as far as that. And I think this applies to crypto in that you just have to replace with number and then you get the same message. And if angles was alive today, maybe he would say something like all that is solid melts into data points because the price is just that. And all that is holy is profane. such as when you put access to your friends on chain or your mom to well decide what her value is in terms

of price. And of course, I think the danger is that we have more and more data and less and less wisdom. We have more and more numbers, more and more tokens, more and more price. And we have the illusion that we are making progress when maybe we are not doing that at all. And as Einstein once says, any fool can know, the point is to understand. And we might not be doing a good job at that if we abstract everything and reduce everything to a number. And it might actually also make us more depressed. But hey, there's the good news. That's not the only problem. We also have a lot of elitism. And I don't know, I grew up like with not a lot of financial means.

And even now I'm kind of if I don't have a job for a longer time I'm probably also screwed situation. But in crypto this seems at least if you are on CT not to be the case. There is this obsession with Dubai. And I put Merch on there because he's probably the crypto bro me and the people on Hinge are scared of like an obnoxious ambassador for this soleless city of Dubai where only the people who have significant means can go and live anyway. And there's also, of course, the cost of privacy that isn't often talked about, at least I don't see people say how much these privacy hardware things cost and take

into consideration that most people can probably not afford that. And of course, the cost isn't just financial. It's also the friction, the learning curve, everything that's required. And the potential that none of your friends are using these things. So then it doesn't matter, right? if I protect my privacy but you still leak my chat history then yeah whatever it's still out there and then of course there's ECC and Khan which I don't need to talk to about much because there have been plenty of people who put off threads on why this is a shitty choice and these people are now fomoing into going and I just say actions speak louder than words and I will remember so there's also the other thing that we are not for everyone even

though we always say this and this is a uh screenshot I took from a Twitter interaction where Tim from Kiwi News was pointing out to somebody from AVA who was raving about how well it's great that you can now earn 5% on your euro C with no says pay and he was pointing out that well you know 40% of people are living paycheck to paycheck in Germany and to actually earn those 5% you need to have 12,000 euro worth of no in your Is that really realistic for somebody who's living paycheck to paycheck? I doubt it, but that is the kind of place we're at. And of course, here's another screenshot from the Kiwi chart. Rest in

peace. Um, and this was about Yeah, shout out Mark who pointed out that if you use Rainbow Wallet on Android, the system buttons overlap with the app buttons. And well, we are building these pro pro projects for everyone except for the 3.3 billion people using Android worldwide. And then of course you might wonder what happened to all of these things. We were dreaming of like banking the unbanked and now the worst part is we left this narrative entirely to Cardano and that is somehow worse than actually not talking about it at all. We also kind of have this open internet but for some reason it's token gated. We also have the actual contrarians who are now

sponsoring the military complex. Um, and then we also like we're the dreamers of a better future. A lot of the time the pitch for crypto now is okay big tech society everything is going to but you can escape if you join our network state which is just another kind of cult. Um, and I think the reason is because we've become very close with big tech ideology. There's a huge overlap between a lot of negative kinds of isms like technofascism and determinism and crypto bros and yeah we we've adopted a bunch of things from them such as the blind techno optimism not the end kind which also is a bad thing to adopt entirely but the idea

that every problem you can and should be fixed with technology. There's also this entire perception that we have that ethics are kind of weak and if you have empathy for somebody that is just like a you problem. Um and then there's of course the hyperindividualism which is a problem because everything is always framed as the sovereign individual and nobody ever talks about something like a sovereign community or collective or whatever. It's only everything is always your problem.

Yeah. I I think this is where I can bring Freud back. Um so he started the civilization and its discontents with stating that it is impossible to escape the notion that we use the wrong measurements and that we forget what is the true value in life. And I mean that's pretty much true in crypto. And what this has given us is that we all get burned out. We all feel like everyone is alone. Everyone is empty. People no longer have needs of each other. And we are all fighting on Twitter instead of banding together and doing something about it. And maybe the worst part of it is that it has given us nihilism because if you reduce

everything to just a price, nothing means anything anymore. Nothing is incomparably precious anymore. And yeah, I'm on the spectrum, but so is crypto. And yeah, you're probably now thinking, man, this is really depressing and it's just Monday, so what could possibly come next? Um, and yeah, if you haven't watched Psychopath, you should. Uh, but what could we do? Should we get everybody to read the self-overcoming of nihilism by Nishitani? Is that realistic in an industry where people can't even read 300 character tweets?

Or do we just stay negative because being a hater is kind of fun. Um, and it can push you places if you channel it constructively. Like look at me. Being a hater has put me on this stage. So, it's not too bad. Um, but yeah, I think the the thing we need to do is to reimag what we can and should do and how we should uh build culture. And of course, it's hard to share one's perception, but I'll still try. And often I think it starts with a simple step of putting yourself into your users, your community members shoes.

And yeah, I think the best way we can start building a culture that is less hostile and less reductionist is by very simply disconnecting from CT and reconnecting with the real world. You might see a bird, you might see something else that sparks your interest. And a now largely forgotten philosopher has once stated that culture is built when leisure moment in crypto they don't and it shows everybody is always angry or having FOMO and yeah I think another thing we need to start doing is to start caring about something and I know this is really hard to sell to people with a utilitarian mindset because it requires them to not

see everything as being the same anymore, but to choose what you actually care about. And if you don't know where to start, maybe start with caring about your own human essence, your humanity, your soul, doing things that actually fulfill you without being a chase of some memecoin gains. And then I mean this is cheesy, but it is also kind of true that we do not stay alive because number go up. And the problem with that is you will never have enough. But it is beauty, poetry, romance, and love. This is what we stay alive for. And that is what makes us feel things. So maybe sometimes reconsider what makes me feel something that isn't rage or FOMO in crypto. It

doesn't happen that much, but if you do find these things, maybe try to create more of them. And yeah, I think my suggestion is that we need more romance and beauty in this rugged place. We kind of scared away all the artists when we reduced all of the art from something that is supposed to move us to remind us of our own humanities or something that you should buy and sell for a profit ideally as quick as possible because that's good for the marketplace. And so yeah, let's bring some beauty into this. Some romance. I put it there because if you put divine femininity, nobody's going to listen to you. But I think the romanticism developed as an

answer to enlightenment's focus on rationality and reducing everything into reason and in a way people into machines and I think that's why we need this kind of counterweight in crypto as well where it is about also taking into consideration some of the qualitative measures. How do people feel when they use your app? Is that something people ever take into account in crypto? No. They usually just look at the numbers and as long as people use it, they think everything's great. And yeah, the good thing is we all create culture. It's not just the DF or whoever else is in high places. Anybody can start. And you can do that by creating the kind of events

you want to see, the writing you want to see, all those things. Um, and one of the things that I got roped into was writing a manifesto where we envision how things could maybe be different. And in many ways, crypto people because we lack humanities, they might have never had exposure to ideas like ethics or morals. And so the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. And we are trying to put those together. And there will be a talk at 2:20 today where you can learn more about how that might look like by wasim. So look out for that. And yeah, you know, the future isn't determined. And there's a kind of freedom in that because we can

reinvision and reimagine it and contribute to making it the kind of place we want it to be. And this can start small. You don't have to make a huge event because we are trying to measure qualitative things first. Right? Yesterday we had a book exchange. It was great. It was just 10 people. Anybody looking from the outside in crypto would be like, "What? Just 10 people?" But in terms of the quality of connections we made, it was probably better than me going to a thousand people conference. So yeah. Um, so what are we waiting for? I think the trick is just to know what you're fighting for. And for me personally, it's to kind of carve out a space in crypto where we do try and

create something that actually puts technology back where it should be. Not as a tool to further enslave or build your own empire, but as a tool to enable and to empower and maybe bring humans together and give them a place to flourish and not well get addicted to this to earn thing where the rewards are just waning every time and in the end you're just depressed. So instead, I think we should use technology for more beneficial causes.

And yeah, so that's me born to romanticize and crypto bro culture is a bit of a So, I'm trying to get people together who feel this way so that maybe we still have a chance because I do believe that crypto and blockchain is probably the best attempt we have at creating something that's actually standing and opposing the big tech extractive mindset. And even if it's just a small corner, I think we should start there. And yeah, that's it from me. Thank you so much for listening and for putting up with me on a Monday morning.

Hey everyone, we have time for one, two questions. Do you have any to have this feedback loop with Nomi in the morning? Josh, maybe you can ask something. No pressure. Uh, what are you positive about? What am I positive about? Positive? Well, of course about the money faster we are writing. Yeah, I guess what are the things that people can cling on to to why should they still continue with crypto? Uh, so for me it was out of spite largely cuz if you just leave this space to the tech bros, it's just going to get worse and I think there is this

sense where we all have a meaning crisis, right? And I think it's because we abstract everything. So maybe I mean I still there is still people who are actually nice and decent in this space. So I am positive especially about like non-speculative apps that kind of take away this entire like to earn it's all about finance um and just let you do stuff that you want like it can be messaging it can be productivity suites and yeah I'm also positive about smaller communities and usually those are hidden away in group chats but those are like the most interesting conversations I've usually had in crypto so Yeah.

So, so listening to that I it felt like about 60% of the the problem was Twitter. Like I And just like just on the on the previous point, right? If you've got a space which is kind of poisonous, should you stick around on the space and try and improve the culture for the people who are still there or should you just move on from the space? Well, I think of course cryptotrader is a huge problem, but I've had many toxic experiences also going to crypto conferences. So, it's not apparently the problem doesn't go away when you see people face to face unfortunately. And may it's like you go up to somebody and then you say like basically I'm not a VC and I'm not rich

and then they're like okay goodbye. So I mean that's that's like transactional thinking in real life and and so sometimes I just made up and I pretended to see where it goes. But I think that's why we need the humanities people to do like anthropological experiments like that. Go to crypto conference pre pretend being a VC and then pretend being a poor person to see like how the interactions change. Um, so yeah, I think the problem isn't just crypto Twitter, although I think it's ironic we continue using it even though we always preach about decentralized social. Yeah, we can't expect