Yesterday I had a quasi-viral tweet about how I cannot for the life of me find an explanation as to why Web3 and the blockchain are so inevitably the future. Charlie Warzel, ever the optimist for no given reason suggested the following:

Instead of a technology achieving mass adoption and creating a culture in its wake, much of the crypto movement is a durable culture that is waiting for its mass-adoption product and trying to spin up technologies that augment the culture.

Now, I realize that one can make a compelling and true argument that the wealth generated by and the popularity of bitcoin and Ethereum can be classified as mass adoption** of a technology (blockchains) and that the culture surrounding crypto is proof of the cycle behaving normally. But once again, the language coming from Web3 boosters suggests that the digital currencies are just the building blocks for something even more revolutionary that will upend our lives and economies. Here’s where I see Web3 as a culture in search of its killer technological application.

Without focusing too much on my petty grievances, I am sick and tired of so many people giving Web3 the benefit of the doubt. Charlie’s meandering point is that the culture is established – and that said culture is “durable” – and, I think, that because the Web3 zealots are suggesting that “something even more revolutionary” is coming that we now have proof of said culture’s durability? It’s an extremely confusingly-worded paragraph that eventually concludes that culture moves too fast to be captured by the media, and thus we may not realize the future is here until it arrives.

The existence of a culture does not prove that the culture is durable or important. And I believe that an alarming amount of people in the media are actively trying to make Web3 a thing – they want it to exist and want it to succeed so much that they are willing to throw caution to the wind and write about it as if it’s 2013 and every new startup is a beautiful angel.

Paris Marx made a very good point on this subject:

Without knowing what Marx is talking about, this is a compelling accusation to make of the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, who wrote a childlike piece about a project called “Pudgy Penguins” where he was given an NFT (which he gave back) as some sort of vague investigation into what NFTs are, which ended up being “a collection of images and a Discord server.” This naturally pumped the price, which has now tumbled down to roughly a third of what it was a few days after the Times’ article. When I wrote about this before, I mostly focused on how the rich get richer, and that once something bubbles to mass media, the con men have already got several stages in and almost everybody entering the system is a mark.

I am not suggesting that Roose is malevolent, but that he is acting (as the media tends to be on the subject of crypto) with a complete lack of responsibility to his readership. Casey Newton – Roose’s new podcast-mate – said that he “tries to approach web3 stuff with open-minded skepticism” because “so much of the energy and talent and money in tech right now is racing toward crypto,” a deeply worrying statement that reflects the ridiculousness of the situation without acknowledging that yes, many billions of dollars and many people can all lie to themselves at scale.

The problem is that Web3 and crypto are unprecedented, but not in a qualitative sense. Cryptocurrency has rapidly accelerated to absorb venture capital and talent in the same way that buzzy industries tend to, as tech talent tries to search for the next big thing that can give them a giant equity payout (as they should!). Previously, this has usually been justified by some degree of substance – for example, even in the most loathsome depths of the gig economy rush, it was still relatively obvious that you would want to order something to your door from your phone. In the case of crypto, there is a giant, gaping hole where substance should be, filled with Osteen-level zealotry and the vague promise that the future is going to use this stuff.

This is a remarkable challenge to journalism because you cannot – and should not – write about many of these products as if people are acting in good faith. Instead of analyzing why a trillion-or-so currency exchange that also connects to a decentralized network of the slowest and most expensive computers known to man, they’re trying to find ways to squint hard enough to see any good in it. If you argue that a journalist should have an open mind, you are wrong – a journalist should investigate and validate the claims they are making and frame their questions as such.

That’s why when