The friends we made alone
So recently FTX came crashing down. Yet another media hyped ‘progressive’ technology darling turned out to be a giant fraud. That’s the thing, on the internet there is a constant culture of hype and disappointment and it’s been this way for a long time in the tech space. From Enron and Worldcom to Theranos and Transatomic, to FTX and whatever the hell is on Elon Musk’s coked out mind, hype trains and fraud are the order of the day in the new economy. I was thinking about this, about how FTX’s CEO who looks like some sketchy guy you’d see milling around Port Authority was sold as the next JP Morgan and how the hype train and crash isn’t a bug to the devotees of the new economy, it’s the main event.
Back in 2013 I was at a buddy’s house, and we were watching a teaser trailer for a game by a zippy Polish developer that promised to be released when it was ready. Cyberpunk 2077. After that, it dropped off the radar for half a decade, and when it resurfaced boy was it a doozy. By that point, I had moved on from gaming but I watched the trainwreck build. The game was sold as being everything to everyone, a sci-fi RPG with action elements. An involved branching storyline. Multiple endings and character classes. An open world with NPC scripting so lifelike it would feel like a real city, with events happening without player involvement. Never mind that Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the pen and paper game Cyberpunk 2077 was based on had distanced himself from the project, or genre defining writers like William Gibson were skeptical about the game, Keanu Reeves was going to be in it! It was going to be the best game of all time. Even with the delays, it was going to be a mind bending, generation defining gaming experience, all you had to do was preorder. Fan hype built and built, excitement grew, and as the world was shoved into the Wuhan Coof lockdowns, the end of year release date for Cyberpunk 2077 was the light at the end of a long tunnel. Fan excitement was erected faster than a PRC investment bubble city. How dare anyone say that CD Projekt Red was anything other than the best developer of all time, they were going to make the amazing game Cyberpunk 2077! The hype train ran straight and erect right into Night City.
Then the game was released. It was a buggy mess, quite literally unplayable on legacy consoles, and it was no longer an RPG, but rather a GTA style crime simulator but IN THE FUTURE and with a lot less plot development or world building than GTA games from 15 years earlier. The fans were enraged, and they commiserated about how much CD Projekt Red sucked, how they were frauds, how they were the worst developer ever. But reading through the metacritic you started to notice something. Something else you’d noticed when No Man’s Sky flopped out of the gate or when Fallout 76 was revealed to be a giant shit from Todd Howard’s ass. There was a camaraderie and joy in feeling cheated. Just as strong if not more so that the camaraderie that existed in the pre-drop hype. What mattered wasn’t the games themselves, they were largely irrelevant. What mattered was the community. The joy in collectively imagining how good the product would be, and the shared rage when it turned out that the marketing hype was, well marketing hype. Now not all games are like this of course, a lot of great games get made, but even when games are shit, even when it’s clear before they launch that the hype is overblown, the excitement is the same. Because it’s not about the games. It’s never about the games. In our horribly atomized modern civilization, It’s about the internet bonding over a shared consumer experience.
Which brings me to FTX and the crypto community. A lot of ink has been spilled about whether or not crypto software is the future or if it is hype, if it has just been misapplied or if it can truly be revolutionary, if it will be adopted en masse or if it will fade out like an olestra shart. Hot take, it will always be around, because it’s not about the technology or the white papers or the fintech or any other nerd shit. It’s about the crippling loneliness.
See, let’s think about FTX/Alameda, our recent big boom and bust (via fraud, don’t forget they were frauds who were attempting to do regulatory capture to make their fraud legal) revolutionary crypto brokerage/hedgefund. If you look at their leadership team, they look and dress like public masturbaters I’ve seen hanging around down by a bus stop on Central Ave. Not anyone you’d let babysit your kids not to mention anyone you’d lend money to. Slick Charles Ponzi style operators they were not. And yet, people gave them billions. Now of course you could say it was the simple lust for money that con artists always exploit, that their Nigerian email scam tier ‘15% returns forever!” pitch only worked on the greedy and gullible. But it was more than that. It was the excitement of getting on board the finance of the future, bonding with your fellow investors over nonsense jargon like ‘Effective Altruism’, hanging out in discord talking about the stuff you’d do with your money. You, yes you, could be a titan of fiance, a man of the future. It was too late for you to catch the 2010’s app wave, and far too late for a lonely sack of shit like you to surf the 1990’s dot com hype, but even this late, through the power of crypto, you, yes you could be part of the future and get rich doing it with your thousands of internet friends. Sure, there was a good chance you’d lose everything. By this point in the game of course it was clear crypto was about as stable and law abiding as a junkie hooker but that really didn’t matter. After the rugpull, and I’m calling it now, the vast majority of investors with FTX knew a rugpull was inevitable, you’d still have your friends to lick your wounds with and commiserate about the shithead fraudsters and scammers. It wasn’t about the money, I have to say this again, it was about the shared investor experience.
So that’s why crypto will always be around, much to the chagrin of the Breadtube types. People want to get scammed as always, but in the modern age they also want friends, a community. Nobody goes to bowling leagues anymore or joins the rotary club. Too much social interaction and stimulation for our autistified age. But there is always the internet, and what brings people together like shared imaginary triumphs and real failures? People want community. They need shared experiences. And the trials and tribulations of E3 or shitcoins or hell, political team shitflinging on Twitter give people that need to belong. A reason to live, for those who are farthest gone. And because the internet is the outgrowth of some 60’s schizo New-Age-and-Pentagon thinking the communities it fosters are a little weird to the rest of us, when we take a step back and look in. After all, Maybe the real wealth was the friends we made along the way. God damn cyberpunk turned out so pathetic.