The vast majority of us folks in the crypto space are here to speculate about economic, technological, and ideological upside of blockchain. On the first front, everyone from retail investors inspired by r/wallstreetbetz to firmly established financial institutions are rushing in as Bitcoin, Ether, and an army of alt-coins skyrocket in value. On the second, we have an expanding battlefield (with prevalent alliances) of developers seeking to build technology that will disrupt our currently taken-for-granted digital landscape. Thirdly, and as an implication of such technology, we are seeing a push towards the decentralization of finance, “trustless” transactions, digital privacy, and crowd-sourcing efforts with aims to revolutionize the internet and economy.
Speculation in crypto is a complex activity of synthesizing micro and macroeconomic happenings, interpreting technical charts, understanding “fundamentals” anew (by assessing network activity, mainly), and reading sentiment. What does culture have to do with any of this?
Simply put: all of these elements of synthesis are conveyed in symbols (language and images) that shape the way we think about the crypto space in general and projects in particular. Studying the crypto space as a culture space allows us to make sense of how this ecstatic web of symbols orient our speculations. This is true for even technology itself as communicated through symbols (see my article “Mapping the Crypto ‘Space’ Vol. 1” for an intro to how this is done).
Blockchains are cultural artifacts and “smart contracts” are only as smart as their use value and immutability – only as “smart” as what is considered “smart” at a particular point in time. In just a decade we’ve seen how “smart phones” have developed so much that the original iPhone would now be considered “dumb” in terms of its user experience and computing capabilities. “Smartness” is shaped by what we know is possible of our computing powers in relation to goals of computing. The “yeses” and “noes” that are represented by the binary “1s” and “0s” are coded by human actors to suit social purposes more or less effectively, and those purposes are culturally driven.
We can focus on network effect from a technical standpoint with applications of heuristics such as Metcalfe’s Law, but this tells us little about the cultural activity that brings people into the network, how they experience being in that network, what keeps them there, what makes them clash with or align with overlapping networks, and what value people are getting out of those networks. It’s for these reasons why I’m proposing a cultural study of the cryptoverse. Clifford Geertz, speaking from the perspective of an anthropologist, summarizes such an approach in his book The Interpretation of Culture:
“the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse. That is of course, not its only aim – instruction, amusement, practical counsel, moral advance, and the discovery of natural order in human behavior are others; nor is anthropology the only discipline which pursues it. But it is the aim to which a semiotic concept of culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial uses, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be casually attributed; it is a context, something within which they can intelligibly – that is, thickly – described” (14).
Blockchain protocols are themselves an “interworked system of construable signs” insofar as they are rule governed systems that determine how data are processed. But when it comes to talking about the culture around blockchain and cryptocurrency, we are no longer centrally interested in the computational code – we are interested in the cultural code. This “code” is a dynamic and varied system of symbols that gain, sustain, and decay meaning through social action. Computational codes are causal systems; cultural codes are not – they are ever-adapting, morphing, and emergent; their structures look more like a kaleidoscope, except with each turn of the instrument, the colors and shapes will endlessly take on unique patterns. Look inside, note how the patterns are interconnected and how they mutate.
What’s peculiar to the crypto space is that its culture largely, yet does not exclusively exists online. Twitter feeds, Telegram groups, and social-media-enhanced exchanges are all ripe for observing and interacting with the culture. Another angle, which can very start opening up as in-person public life comes back into the picture, is to do an ethnography of the developers themselves. The reason being: blockchain protocols are cultural products that are coded by social actors seeking to advance technology to meet emerging needs and disrupt traditional systems (of finance and networking, specifically). Following developers and other in-house actors is a valuable venture that can bring the politics of coding into focus (see Silicon Second Nature by Stefan Helmreich for an excellent example of this treatment to the subject of “artificial life”).
Regardless of the subject analyzed, the point of an ethnography is to “tell it how it is,” that is, to offer a faithful read of what’s actually going on in the culture. Such accounts are more than mere descriptions of the interactions – that’s step one – they are “thick descriptions” that give the reader an accurate sense, insofar as possible, of how people use symbols in a culture. Describe the relations between individuals, their roles, their actions, the conflicts they face, the solutions they develop to remedy the conflict, the community boundaries and their implications. Specificity is the key. How does this community shape the meaning of this crypto project (and vice versa)?
Geertz states that the goal is “to think not only realistically and concretely about [the culture you are studying], but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with them” (24). We can take this “with” to mean actually participating in the community as many of us with interest already do. Although, this is not what Geertz suggests (check out Henry Jenkins work on “participatory culture” for this type of embedded study). To think “with” a community is to become so saturated in their symbol system that little more can show up that’s surprising or novel. This does not mean that you can predict the behaviors of a group, but that your expectations of behaviors are generally on track within the scope of your case.
Let this be an invitation to the curious: We are in the midst of an historical moment that we’ll look back on some years later and acknowledge as a moment of substantial transformation, perhaps even a paradigm shift. Crypto, a realm of technology that is in some way fundamentally anti-institutional, or at least narrativized to be so, is going institutional. Join me as we think about the future implications of a rapidly evolving cultural context.
Geertz, Clifford. The interpretation of cultures. Vol. 5019. Basic books, 1973.
