A Clash of Cultures - The Daily Gwei #450
It's probably not the right time to bring crypto culture to the real world.
It’s always been interesting to me to watch how “internet culture” has never really translated well to real life and ends up being very cringy when people attempt to import it into meatspace. I think the same is true for crypto culture because it is a culture that has been created in the online world which is centered around cartoon avatars and text-based communication - exporting these things to meatspace just ends up feeling forced.
The clashing of cultures is nothing new - the world has thousands of years of brutal history to show how badly it can go when different cultures try to integrate - but I think people trying to export crypto culture into the real world is something totally different. I mean, you can see from in the music video above that saying popular crypto phrases like “wagmi” and “gm” out loud just feels totally out of place and even “bizarre” in a sense. To me, this is because we are just so used to only reading these phrases on places like Twitter and Discord (as opposed to hearing them said out loud).
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some aspects of crypto culture that translate really well to the real world. For example, people getting together at Ethereum hackathons to build awesome things in the presence of Ethereum’s culture of openness is much better than people just sitting at home building things all on their own. But again, this is only the reality because Ethereum culture wasn’t formed exclusively online over a couple of short years like other cultures were (such as NFTs, DAOs, web3 etc) - it was formed over many years both online & offline and through many trials and tribulations along the way.
Lastly, as I mentioned above cultures clashing is nothing new, but typically crypto cultures only really clash online. You’ll see the holy wars between Bitcoin maximalists and Ethereans rage on every other day, the different NFT factions fight over which jpeg is better, and of course the alt-L1’s fans will be going on about how broken Ethereum is. In the end though, at least from the real-life conferences I’ve attended, people tend to put aside their online differences and come together as friends in the real world - it’s honestly quite a nice thing to experience.
I’m not sure if the “cringe” part of crypto culture will always remain since culture can be so ephermeral and finds many ways to seep into our every day lives - but for now I think it’s going to remain very uncanny valley for us to bring online crypto culture into the real world. Though in saying that, it’s going to keep happening regardless of what we do or think - I guess this is just what “mass adoption” really looks like.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.