Why Socialists should NOT cede crypto to the Right
For this interview I spoke to Joshua Citarella (@JoshuaCitarella on social media), an artist, researcher, and Twitch streamer who studies niche online communities. He authored the book the Politigram and the Post-Left exploring esoteric online political beliefs. He has done a lot of work exploring various "e-deologies" and the very online young people who create and subscribe to them. During the interview we discussed the pros and cons of e-deologies, how gamer guilds practice market sociali...
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Transcript
It's always funny because there's some people in my audience or, maybe the extended audience that know me as an artist or other people who know me as a podcaster or a writer or whatever it happens to be. And now after, you know, ten years doing this art and tech style of work, it's funny to encounter new audiences that don't know what you did in the past. So I do a a whole variety of things. I run an arts organization in New York called Do Not Research. I have a podcast stream. I'm a Twitch streamer. I've also shown in galleries, museums, for, like, ten years, in this gutter of art and tech. And, yeah, I've been, publishing everything is under my name across all of the platforms, but there's a variety of interdisciplinary
work. Yeah. So, like, the reason that I found you was actually, I think, was through your Twitch streams, and then I went through, like, a bit of a rabbit hole of of your work that I found really, really interesting. And the fact that, like, it seems to me that you may have, like, started in academia, but were sort of maybe, like, limited by kind of what were considered, like, the bounds of what was, like, good things to study within academics. And so you kinda moved into niche online communities, and I thought that was that was really interesting. Could you talk a bit about about that maybe?
Yeah. Sure. Sure. The, what most people probably know me for currently is that I've spent the last few years interviewing Gen z political meme posters and studying these arcs of politicization, radicalization that happen online. So I'll talk to a thirteen year old meme poster, followed this person now for many years, various interviews, collaborative projects, some in some cases, books published together. And then after, you know, six years in these spaces of twenty four seven running discords, exchanging radical reading materials, posting memes, everything on social media, in some cases, they found new political organizations or they join existing political organizations. And, that kind of sustained, attention in this space, these stories are actually really, really unique. When you see someone enter through, the soft power and the influence of silly, you know, 600 pixel JPEG memes that they're posting onto Instagram, and then they join or make a real meaningful commitment. In some cases, they pay membership dues. They raise money. They do, mutual aid groups, all sorts of things. And, you know, those are those are interesting stories now of how young people are being politicized. So, what those things usually come down to that you can uncover in these in-depth interviews is that at some particular moment when this person was ready to hear a new narrative about how the world was pieced together and organized, they came across a YouTube video by complete chance, and it changed the course of their political evolution. And so the process is through these lengthy in-depth interviews about political imaginaries and online influences of podcasts and content creators and memes and, all of these characters, what were those moments where they took a fork in the road that then led them to where they are? So tracing that path has been, I think, the the bulk of the work that I've been publishing in the last few years. Yeah. So, like, the the the book that I that I know that you, published was called Politogram
and the Post Left, which sort of explores these different esoteric, online political beliefs in groups, I think. But I mean what I can't even imagine what that is like because you have to have I mean, I guess depending on the group that you're in, you have to have a little bit of tough skin, to be able to handle like, I, I don't know. I mean like these type of like young people who maybe feel very strongly about things that you may feel are just like, you know, maybe like absolutely disgusting or just like unbelievable things to and, and also still like take them seriously as, as research subjects, I guess. But, like, how did you I mean, do you have any tips for people to, like, be able to grow that, that thick skin?
Oh, boy. It comes with the territory. It's, if you don't have it, you won't be able to last in these spaces because everyone is constantly roasting each other all the time. I will say, though, for all of the, you know, fringe conspiracy adjacent reactionary stuff that I've, like, in the last few years, put myself out on a ledge to, like, you know, defend the, confused political leanings of, like, a young teenager who's at risk for really bad ideas on the Internet and say that, you know, these people can be effectively counter messaged to. The responsibility of the left is to provide an alternative interpretation and win them over, you know, to engage in debate and and bring these people to your side. Of all of those questionable people that I've put my reputation at stake to defend, the one thing that I have been attacked the most for is involvement with blockchain. Really? Like yeah. Yeah. By, like, orders of magnitude. It's really funny to see, you know, what provokes the the response and the backlash. Yes. But, generally, I think by participating in this space, you accumulate a thick skin over time that comes with scale. And, you know, anyone who's in content creation, I think, has has to learn this eventually. Certainly, the meme posters learned it very early on because they're looking to provoke an outrage and, you know, create something that irritates and then goes viral and spreads through the network. So they develop those responses pretty quickly.
Yeah. I think I I developed my thick skin, I think, because I mean, I'm I'm definitely a child of the Internet. Like, I I think my first, like, real, like, I guess, platform that I was really addicted to or, like, on a website was Nintendo forums. To be honest, I was like, dude, I was, like, really into Nintendo and really into Super Smash Brothers. And, like, the Super Smash Brothers community is like a very it can also be a quite intense intense one. Of course. And so, like, I was there, you know, like, super young. I mean, just like we just get into, like, the dumbest fights with people about, like, you know, who who what is the next character that that they shouldn't put into, like, the newest Super Smash Brothers game? Like, as if we had any power to do any of that. Like, as if Internet Nintendo gave a single shit about any of our opinions. And we just get into, like, the most, like, intense debates that become so personal so fast.
Yeah. There's a style of arguing on the Internet that, privileges the communication networks, the style of posting and all of these things and has nothing to do with a truthful claim, but, can be amplified just through, like, oh, damn. That was a really good word. I was like, that comment was really strong. He's not gonna come back from this. And and, I mean, it's funny because these things begin as jokes, but then, you know, my thought is that post 2012 with the mass adoption of Facebook and these social media platforms is that any young person who goes into a political organization is going to have necessarily passed through social media at some point. So what we're seeing in, various subcultures of all kinds that were maybe not specifically on the Internet, but now all take place over social media, is that the old cultural, you know, the certain privileges and affordances, the stylistic qualities of Internet banter, memes, phrases, things like this are kind of working their way into subcultures of all kinds. Right? Just purely by the fact that they they take place online now. And so there's a certain political, teleology to that, which is, you know, this infinite niche vacation of online subcultures that, seems to be playing out right now on social media. And there's all different tendencies that are flourishing that, you know, in the case of the left, rehash all of these, one might say outdated, debates of things that happened a 100 years ago, but leftist and historians love to infinitely, rehash and debate and so on and so forth. So, yeah, my sense is that while these things begin as jokes in many cases, the influence of the Internet onto political organization is going to be quite substantial, in the years
moving forward. Yeah. I mean, I would say that it it already is, it seems to me. I mean, just like it's clear that every political organization that that that I'm aware of uses social media in some capacity to organize this or that events, for whatever reason.
Well, the I mean, I think it's gonna get I think it's gonna get weirder than that because there's a Yeah. Maybe let's say, like, there's an analogy of, like, okay. So So you run an organization, and then you have, a email list or you have a list server or something like that. And, the Internet can be used as outreach. But in that case, you're kind of I'm borrowing this from, little Internet, of the new models podcast. You described an inflection point that happened, I think, some point during the twenty tens, where previously people would upload their lives onto the Internet, and now we tend to download our lives off of the Internet. There's a reverse of this polarity. And so I'm I'm more interested now in kind of extrapolating out these curves where political organizations can form from online communities, and they kinda do the reverse. So there could be in the case of a content creator that has a a, you know, especially wide reach that the most active people of those following, of that following then collect in a Discord. And then within the Discord, they have an IRL meetup channel. And then these people go and they canvas together or they stage a protest or they stage some type of, you know, in some cases,
a scene. I can't.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the the implications of this are actually quite dangerous because you get a bunch of radicalized people who then go out and do some kind of dangerous stunt. And and we've seen that quite a bit through the last three, several years. And a lot of these people are quite young. They're very politically active. They're extremely dedicated to a cause, and they've been into it for just a few years. So, you know, these things are are quite novel in how they've politicized people in their their developments. So, I'm interested to see what of these things will be able to survive, and the type of politics they have are extremely weird and, like, cooked in the gutter of the Internet. You know? Right. So, like, this is our Maga tankies, exo proletariat,
you know, the mecca peasantry. Just, like, shit that's totally wild and made up. Right. So, like, this is this is, like, a bit awkward for me as well. Yeah. Being, like, the person who started, the crypto leftist, group. But like There you go. But before we before we get to that weird stuff, I like so this is what you would call I think you call it ideologies. So Yeah. So I guess that is specific to, like, instead of you are putting your political beliefs onto the or importing your political beliefs onto the Internet and using it, you're sort of creating your political beliefs through interactions over the Internet, If that make like, in that direction. Yeah. They're they're jamming together,
like, a b pairings. Right? So, like, well, let me just give a few Like crypto and lactism. Very much so. Yeah. I mean, I've done I've done a series of flags that are, representations of these various ideologies, like email, ideology. And you get things like monarcho syndicalism is my favorite, which is a an alliance between the crown and the, the organized trade unions against the emergent merchant class. You get things like anarcho primitivist caliphatism, libertarian neo monarchism. Maybe that one is actually a little more present now than than a joke. There there's all shades of, like, queer anarcho transhumanism. I'm just running through the flags in my head. You know, Catholic distributism. Who else is in there? There's there's a whole variety of shades of basically people pairing together different descriptors to come up with a, you know, individual ideology as, like, a personal brand, more or less. Right? How do you set yourself apart from the crowd? And, you know, branding is always part of politics, having some kind of appeal, but there's something especially characteristic of these ideologies that feels tailored to web two social media where when you find the right combination of incongruent pairings, that it then explodes into a viral sensation. So, there's been a few of those that are rather more inflammatory, especially in the taboo corners of the Internet. And these things, you know, sometimes have, like, a relatively mainstream audience in that a fringe Twitter personality can be brought onto a mainstream talk show and, you know, get a chance to air their views. And, you know, in that sense, like, the the Internet is actually doing a pretty big impact onto shaping the discourse that you have a, you know, kind of random Internet political radical who is then getting an audience of, I don't know, 50,000,000 people on Tucker Carlson. Right.
It's, yeah. It's been it's been weird seeing, like, I don't know. There was also that incentive, like, the r slash anti work, like, moderator on, like, I think it was Fox or something like that. But seeing kind of, like you know, people make the joke Twitter Twitter isn't real life or whatever like that, but then it's sort of, yeah, the direction seems to be shifting, like, the other way in, like, a kind of uncomfortable way, I think, for people. Certainly. Certainly. Yeah. But yeah. So, like, you know, the awkward question then is for me, like, is is crypto left I don't know how much you've, like, necessarily looked into, like, the the like, this community. But is crypto leftism an ideology? Because it is I mean, I I when I made up the word, I was like, well, I mean and same with the name of my podcast, I was like, well, I mean and same with the name of my podcast. I was like, well, I like this thing and I like this thing. What happens if I put it together? And so like like in in and while I was doing that, I was like completely, like, please keep in mind, I'm aware. I'm like, this is weird as fuck. Like, why am I doing this? And like like, I I wish I wasn't this weird. But, like, I really felt like I needed to do it. So yeah. So in some ways, whereas, like, I think a lot of the examples that you gave are, for me, very strange, like, pairings of things that seem completely incompatible in in real life. I can imagine a lot of people probably feel the same way about about, crypto leftism, you know, whatever that is. I never really I never really defined it. I just, you know, just looking at crypto through a left wing political lens. But
Well, I think what you find in some of these cases is that these the pairing of belief systems that seem incongruous, If they seem incongruous, you later uncover unexpected ways in which they reinforce each other, and, that yields new insights that, you you might not have had otherwise. So it's kind of like looking at, you know, a a random image generation or Rorschach, and then you kind of put the meaning onto it. And, it helps to, like, you know, spur all sorts of, like, creative, insights and innovation and and whatever. So, yeah, I think those things are actually very, very useful. And I think we do have a real, we do have a real problem now in how our our political landscape is divided, which, I've spent a lot of time on this in the last few years where, a certain issue will be sliced in one way and, you know, this is a right wing issue, that is a left wing issue, and they're actually on the really on the wrong side of the discourse. And people end up seeding what should be very contested territory competing for the people who are interested or care about that topic. And instead, they're just, nope. Anybody who touches that is, you know, they're they're evil. They're part of the other side. They're beyond help, and then we shouldn't outreach. We shouldn't have outreach to them. And that's I've I've tried to, make the case that that is a catastrophic mistake, and that is where you need to be spending most of your attention because that's where you can actually win over the hearts and minds of the coalition you're trying to build. Particularly in the case of the left in The United States, we've had a lot of problems with that recently. And, as evidenced by social media, many people have become politicized into very right leaning ideas, I think mistakenly so. And, you know, I am tempted to rephrase, the current regime of neoliberalism in The United States as a type of ideology itself because it is riddled with contradictions. Right? So if you were to say, you know, woke mass incarcerationism, that would not be an inaccurate description of American neoliberalism. Right? Like, there's there's all sorts of, Yeah. Yeah. You know, rugged individualist oligarchic bailoutism. Like, that that is an existing reality, and it is Right. It is riddled with contradictions itself. So, I think what is most interesting is to kind of take the contentious position that some of these teenagers have useful insights more than they're producing ideological garbage and detritus, and there's something to be learned from that. You know? Once you step outside of your own political reality and into someone else's, you can then bring back some insights. It really does shift the way that you think. And, especially in the case of young people playing with these symbols on social media, I think the to just to just state it outright, they're looking down the barrel of, some pretty disastrous political consequences, environmental consequences within their lifetime. So they're very incentivized to come up with a new way of organizing society, and maybe these games of, like, personal branding and pairing political prefixes and suffixes are an attempt to solve, like, what is that missing thing? Like, what what needs to happen? You know? Previous revolutions, twentieth century experiments with socialism failed. There's not much to be optimistic for, so people are kind of they're they're mining all of political history, and then they're jamming together things that seem kind of interesting to come up with a solution.
Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. That's that's a really interesting way of putting it. Yeah. I guess, when you're looking, like, seeing no optimistic future, then you might as well, like or no optimistic, like, maybe, like, group to join or, like, political organization to be a part of, then you might as well make one up and, like, hope that it's better. But, like, yeah, sometimes I I I hear this a lot. Like, this is something I've you really notice. I mean, before I was starting with when I before I started the blog and the podcast, I never really used Twitter. But then when I started using Twitter, I just noticed, like, some of the, like, most ridiculous combinations I felt of, like, of sim of symbols, like, on their on their usernames and, like Yeah. You know, on their tags and, like and then you could, like, kind of see if you, like, go through their Twitter, like, kind of, like, this weird, like actual group of people who all kind of like found each other with their weird niche thing that they're into. And they all found each other on Twitter. And that was and that like, to me, like I remember, or or I mean, I wasn't I didn't see it myself. But, like, you know, Bill Gates had talked about, like, you know, when he was in trying to introduce the Internet on these, like, late night shows being like be like, you can find people with, like, the same niche interest. And it's like like now we're in that reality. Like, we're in that reality to the extreme.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. It's I mean, it it is in some ways, it's a very positive development for, a kinda decentralized political think tank of coming up with all wacky solutions. Yeah. And in some cases, there's, you know, this is effective at producing the the discourse, but it certainly does it is just tinged with all of the weird peculiarities of, like, web two social media where everybody is trying to, like, carve out some extremely niche thing that is inflammatory in the right way that then amplifies it, you know, a thousand fold. Yeah. And it turns into a viral sensation.
Yeah. I I think and this is still super awkward for me because I think a lot of people see me that way. And I feel like I've inadvertently become that person when I don't really, like, necessarily want to be. Well, let's It's hard it's hard for me to, like, disentangle myself from that reality, though.
Let me I'll read you one here. This is just I was trying to pull up a good example that came to mind recently, but this one reads Leninist, Ron Paulist, Maoism within monarchist America. So, you know, crypto leftism is, I think relatively towards the the center of the Overton window compared to this, like I mean, it's a mouthful. It's a paragraph of a political label.
Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. I I definitely tried to I think because I was aware of this tendency to happen, I was I tried to keep it as open as possible and not not too specific
in one direction or another since I feel like it's usually not very helpful. Well, I saw from you actually I think this was maybe yesterday or the day before, but, a certain quote from professor Richard Wolff about DAOs that was like, wow, this was not what I expected to see. But, you know, I think that is kind of evidence of the thing is that when you jam these terms together, you do produce unexpected insights. And, you know, I I think that there is, you know, some real opportunity to create cooperative structures that the left has always sought to do, and, this would seem to be a very frictionless infrastructure to, create some of those organizations. So, there are real potentials to it, and it's kind of interesting, yeah, that it comes from what is largely like a a libertarian and kind of monetarist, ideology ideology or rhetorical discursive background. Right? That's the language within which all this stuff is wrapped, but other opportunities exist within it. Yeah. So in in case people didn't didn't see it,
on for some reason in Yahoo, professor Wolf said in an interview, that, quote, the advent of blockchain technology and DAOs could be a way to achieve a genuine democratic control over the means of production. And, of course, I I retweeted it with that quote because I was also extremely surprised that he said something like that since he had he had made comments before and I had written about it, what he had said. And it was just obvious he just, like, didn't know that much about it and just kind of, like, you know, rolling with whatever, most others' opinions was on, or are on on the left anyways. But it does, like I mean, it it it it caused, friction, like, with a lot of like, like, there are already, like, other left wing content creators now who are, like, oh, no. Like, professor Wolf, what are you doing? Like, what what shitty grad student convinced you about this or whatever?
Well, if I can I I do have I do have a thought on this that, like I mean, I'd be interested to hear because I think you probably have this experience a lot? But, like, spending a lot of time in left wing circles, there's, you know, a real hesitancy. We went through, you know, at this point, many, many decades of, extreme defeat, and the belief systems that grow out of that are often, honestly, just ways of coping with long term defeats where you have to, you know I'm empathetic, but it is it is immensely frustrating because, there's a real reluctance on the left to do it to have a serious engagement with economic topics, period, just across the board. And people tend to live in a totally, fictitious, you know, made up belief system that everybody's gonna do everything for free, and we're all just gonna get along and participate and share. And, you know, everything should be uploaded onto the Internet for free and you should, like, you know, create all of these structures of, just like being basically an unpaid community serve servant in every aspect of your life. And I mean, that is quite explicitly the ideology of these, as I refer to it in the essay, the techno feudalist web two platforms that want you to do all that stuff for free. This is a very kind of necrotic toxic belief system, and I think people, as a way of coping with the impossibility of any sort of victory, the economic topics have just receded from the conversation. And so if you look back at older periods of the left and, I mean, honestly, even the period that, like, our parents grew up in, wages, the percent of the surplus value you create, how much of that do you actually get back through your wages, that has, like, kinda disappeared in favor of this idea that everybody should work for free all of the time. And the hesitance to discuss any topic of, like, who gets what share of the pie of all the valuable things that we produce is now the thing that perpetuates this extreme, extreme inequality in creative economies. You know, so it's a it's a real, it's a cultural problem on the left, especially in the field of, creative economies that now has cascading influences throughout everything else. And, to think that people should be compensated for their work is now, I think, in some cases, a very, unfavored idea among these left wing circles. You know? And and that is what crypto forces you to do. Like, it forces you to talk about what is the value being exchanged between all these, parties. And, you know, I mean, I think Richard Wolff, I'm actually quite happy to hear this quote from him because he spent quite a bit of time, you know, over the the past ten years talking about, building worker cooperative structures, which is, I think agreed upon by many people at this point after, you know, a long history of, like, failed twentieth century experiments that, like, within the structures of capitalism, you can have, worker cooperatives where people own, equity in the company. They get a percentage of the profits. Those things can exist within capitalism as it currently stands and then can potentially build a path outwards. So I think that's a really positive development. And, you know, I'm interested to see where where he goes with some of those things.
Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, we'll see whether or not Richard Wolff's opinion, changes anybody's thoughts on the when it comes to these things. One of the other things I really wanted to get to because I think it's also related to probably the research well, it is, like, the research that you have been doing, but to to what we're talking about when it comes to, like, these kind of strange mixtures of, of ideologies and then also the idea that of kind of, like, people what people do is sort of different than necessarily what people say or what they what they think they're doing necessarily. And it's the research that you did on these sort of MMORPG guilds in, like, things like World of Warcraft or I think maybe a different game but similar, but how these guilds of of people who play this game will sort of like govern themselves, through a system called, DKP or Dragon Kill Points. And, sort of, the the conclusion that you came up with in that research was that a lot of these guilds were practicing a kind of type of market socialism even though, like, probably if you asked any of those, you know, nerds if they were doing market socialism, they would be like, hell no. You know, like, they would be like, I don't do communism. Are you kidding me? Like, that doesn't make it market social. They like, they would probably be like, you probably get the most ridiculous reaction, from these people. But I was wondering if you can maybe go a bit through that research and, like yeah. Because it was it was super interesting when I when I read it.
Yeah. The, let's see. I think the best, condensation of this idea is a video I did for DIS. And actually, you can see this one on YouTube, and then the rest of the series is hosted on dis.art. But the title of that video, I think I've written this out. I've done it as a podcast, and then the video is the most condensed form of it, which was a collaboration with, LA based filmmaker, Jacob Hurwitz Goodman. The title of this piece is DKP is Market Socialism. And this is a little bit of a provocation, but, if you haven't spent a lot of time playing Wow or in other MMO guilds, DKP is essentially a loot system. So you have you're faced with this problem where you have, say, 20 to 40 people collaborating on going into this dungeon to kill a boss. The boss is going to drop four to five pieces of loot, and then you have to you're faced with this problem of how do you distribute the scarce resources because there's not enough loot for everyone. There's only five people who can get it. And so there's various solutions for that. Some of which for casual organizations, they just do a lottery ticket type of thing where they they pick a random number, that person wins it. There's other types of tiered memberships to these organizations. But, you know, let's keep in mind that if you're raiding in World of Warcraft, you're playing for probably three to six hours a week for, like, a year. You know? Like, this is a pretty lengthy commitment. Like, I think, one day a week is kind of uncommon. Two days a week is the minimum. Some guilds do three days a week. So these things really, really, the hours total up to be quite quite a hefty commitment at the end. And, you know, those structures, if there's extreme inequality within the organization, they're not very durable. So to get people to have a, you know, group of people who routinely show up on time, are actively incentivized to participate, there's gotta be some type of relatively equitable distribution of the resources so that everyone feels like they stand a decent chance to go and get the thing that they want from this dungeon. The system that is most time tested and durable is something called DKP, which stands for dragon kill points. And, this is let me describe how, let me describe how the system works because it's I think if you haven't played these games, it might be a little bit abstract. You get a small reward for showing up on time. Every time you kill a boss, you get an additional reward. So everybody's getting paid, you know, 10 d k p to show up, 15 d k p for each boss you kill. There's also every fifteen minutes, you're getting a tiny little, you know, like five points of DKP. So you're getting paid for good performance, killing the boss, for, showing up on time, for staying until the end, being prepared with all the gear and the resources you need, all the consumables for when you go to raid. And then there's also a wage at fifteen minute increments. So everyone is being compensated for their labor, by by the clock, but then also an additional bonus for good performance. So everybody across the board is incentivized to play their best in this case. Nobody is phoning it in and, you know, letting someone else carry the do the heavy lifting and so on. So, when the loot drops and you have four to five pieces from this boss, you then enter a bidding system within which the points that were rewarded to people for time, attendance, and boss kills then are used in this bidding war to see who wants to pay the most for this plus 50 healing mace or who wants to pay the most for this, dexterity dagger or whatever the item happens to be. And those in turn are distributed through the use case that, you know, if you are a rogue, you're going to bid on the dexterity dagger. But if you're a mage, you can't bid on the dexterity dagger. You are literally not allowed. And there's certain items that it's it's a bit complicated in World of Warcraft because there's a, internal mechanism called soulbound, which prevents players from trading things in certain cases. But absent that, even the, items that are not soulbound that you could just take out of the collaborative rating environment and then bring to the auction house to realize its value in cash or or in gold, people who are not going to use that item are not allowed to bid on the on the thing. So there's actually very few ways in which you can, harness the productive power of that organization and then capture its value in gold or in capital and the currency of the game outside of the cooperative organization of the guild. All of the value produced by the guild is distributed to the members themselves or to someone individually. And, it seems to me like that is, more or less exactly a workers' cooperative rather than as a lot of these, you know, angsty, you know, in many cases, very far right leaning gamers would describe their politics. Right? It's like, oh, have you considered that you're actually doing a functioning socialist economy in your guild? And they would fucking absolutely freak out. It's like, what? I'm not gay. No. What what are you talking about? Like, it I mean, I've I've played with these people for years and years. I mean, the things that they say are, obscene and and disgusting, but, they're actually under they're they they're in a working, cooperative model that has, like, you know, all the surplus value remains within the community, and it is quite an extraordinary thing. So this is to to bring back this long arc of the topic, I think that, very often people say x and do y. And so the structural analysis of what's actually taking place versus how people describe it, because if you talk to these gamers, they would very often say, like, yeah. I'm, like, the best rogue. I've got the highest DPS. My crits are out of out of control. I'm, like, top of the charts. I'm, like, obviously, the best player. And then, you know, if you like, they would describe themselves very much as being in competition with the other the other players without any sharing of resources. And, there's just a very clear disconnect between the rhetoric they say and the actual economic activity that's going on. So, I'm always looking for those opportunities. I think there's some kind of analogy that you can draw between these very libertarian leaning communities that, discuss crypto and blockchain and so on. And, you know, they they end up accidentally inventing these structures where all of the members of the community can equally own a portion of the organization or the product or whatever it is. And that is, you know, structurally much more similar to a workers cooperative than it is, bootstrapping a narco capitalist startup or whatever. So I'm always looking for those opportunities.
Yeah. So, like, just to go back to to, like, the the research with the, with the DKP, I think what is also similar I mean, a similar comparison is that I mean, you have, like, the joke on the left of, like, I don't know, gaming gaming. There will be no more gaming, like, after the revolution or, like, you know, just, like, people who just, like don't know. People who are just, like, kind of, I mean, as a joke a bit, I think, but I think they're just trying to poke at the that's just, like, the the tendency for, like, people who game or to consider themselves gamers to be all, like, always, like, extremely, like, right wing chuds or whatever. Like, I think what was interesting about your work is that if you look a little bit deeper at sort of, like, what they're actually doing, if you're looking at the, you know, how does it work and what do they do, that looks different than like the aesthetics that they portray which is maybe like Yes. You know them saying curse words or you know making fun of your mom or whatever like when they're when they're talking with each other. So like if I think that's that this there's this some reason it's, like, cultural thing among the Left is just sort of like I mean, one, not having a bit maybe, like, the thick skin to be in these types of communities, which is, like, tough. I can understand. But also just, like, purely focusing on aesthetics as, like, the Yes. The thing that defines, like, what is what is Yes. Political. What is their political ideology? Like, stuff. I think it is gaming is right wing for for some people.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And it's, I think it's a pretty devastating indictment when the far right creates functioning models of a socialist economy and the left can't. Right?
Yeah. I think that the secret is not about the contemporary left. The the secret is maybe not to think of it as as socialism or just, like, don't even politicize it and somehow you reach
socialism somehow. That's I mean, that is that's the curious thing is that many times when you're in, like, a rhetorical or ideological vacuum, you're often open to economic experimentation that you don't explicitly identify as coming under a certain political label. And there's an interesting example of this. This is from a little while ago, so I'm going to I'm not gonna nail the exact location. But, in various deindustrialized red states in The US, there's been a few examples of local towns and cities, essentially, like, nationalizing their supermarkets that were going out of business. So there's but, yeah, I mean, it's it's quite an odd, situation, but, you know, the alternatives were that the store that has been there for a few decades or is maybe owned by a family in the town, those, those stores are just really being outcompeted by Walmart. They're not able to operate at a profit. So the alternative is to either just let them go out of business and everybody has to shop at Walmart, or you can just take over the, the store, run it as a municipal grocery store. The employees of the grocery store literally become employees of the city where they get the health insurance and the wages and, you know, comparable to, clerks and postal workers and so on and so forth. And then, you know, there's been, I think, you know, four or five examples of that happening in The US, especially post pandemic. A few people have remarked on this, but, if you were to look structurally at what they're doing, they're socializing the grocery store. Right? Like, and this is like these are, you know, very conservative, often very religious, you know, communities that are allergic to the idea, the word socialism. But because they don't explicitly conceive of it as having those attachments or implications, they're very open to this economic model, and they prefer the way that it works. So, I mean, I think those those present some weird opportunities, and having done so much work about how people become politicized and, like, you know, slowly drift into their ideas over time. These are moments that I think really interesting for me.
There is this, like, kind of awkward question. I think sometimes that's some when you're on the left for enough time and you see these things kind of happen over and over again where some, like, bright eyed communist tries to go and, like, do x y z thing and just fails miserably. And part of the reason that you maybe are somewhat uncomfortable with maybe admitting is that some people are just turned off by the label. They're just turned off by, like, the fact that you said the word socialism or whatever. So, like, maybe you should have just done it in a way that was, like, not explicitly political. But then you have, I don't know, people who are more gung ho about the labels that they say like, no, no, no. We have to be like explicit. Like, we need to say that we are the Communist Party of whatever and we need to, like, proceed with that. So I think, like, to me it's, it's a tough question. So, like, people have also commented to me about the title Yeah. Of my platform that that they're like, why did you call yourself like, I like, you can't call yourself that because, like, that's you know, two people don't like the word socialism, just, like, pretend, you know, but but I was also at the time, I was like, what the fuck else am I gonna call myself? I had, like, no I just have no creativity at that moment. I was like, I knew the two things and I was like, I I was like, hoping that I would come up with a better name and say There's it's gotta kinda do two things where it's like, you need to propel the branding by pairing together things that are like curious combinations.
But then, there's also a risk when you have something that, like, you know, snag someone's attention that, that can be inflammatory and turn other people off. So, I mean, we're constantly trying to do this balance of, like, essentially controversy marketing in ad driven media that that that really kind of, you know, propels these things, beyond
It's like the only choice you have. Honestly, like, I feel sometimes it's like, what else am I gonna do? Like, we know enough they're not gonna pay attention. Like, if I was Shadow Wolf six nine or whatever, like Yeah. Talking about this stuff, like, they wouldn't give a shit. You know? They especially wouldn't give a shit. What are your thoughts though on saying, like,
like, explicitly identifying with political labels if you're trying to? Because I I know that you have a lot of conversations across different political divides similar to what I do, but, do you does it become, like, a hurdle for you to have socialist explicitly in the name? Are people like, I'm not gonna talk to this guy because, you know, he he's he's on socialism. He doesn't understand
the real economy, you know, like, my Milton Friedman shit. I would say that I mean, whenever if I if you mean, like, if when I reach out to someone, if I to ask them to do an interview or something like that, usually, I know more or less where their politics kind of lies. And, I mean, I've never had someone reply that, like, I would never go on a socialist show or something like that, I think. But I also, like, kind of highly curate who I ask to come on because I'm just not gonna ask, like, everyone to come on. And I like, there are only so many people
who are kind of left leaning in the crypto world. Well, I maybe I should clarify. I have heard people say to me looking at your title that, like, blockchain socialist, either this guy doesn't understand what the blockchain is or doesn't understand what socialism is. And I was like, actually, you don't understand either. The person who's telling me this comment has a very brittle grasp of either of those concepts, which is I think what you can intuit through, like, comparing these things. It's actually it's it's very generative and useful. Yeah. Yeah. You must endlessly, flame work online. Yeah.
On on both sides, like, I mean so, like, to give an example, I posted for, like, the this interview from Richard Wolff in the r/cryptocurrency subreddit, which is also generally a very, like, right leaning, subreddit. And that was it got it got a lot of attention. Like, it was I'm not surprised. It got, like, I don't know. I got I got a lot of upvotes. But it also got, like, a shit ton of comments of people being like, you know, what the fuck? Like, this is ridiculous. Like, Karl Marx would never be for decentralization. Like, Marx was for pure centralized, like, central banks, like, whatever, you know, centralized government. This is the antithesis of that. This guy doesn't know what blockchain is, or like blockchain is the epitome of free market capitalism. And then I also posted it on different, on especially, I have, like, a long history with one, specific online community called, r slash socialist programmers, and they're especially negative about, Interesting. About cryptocurrency or or blockchains. And so they were also all, like, you know, anytime my content has showed up has has been just, like, the same thing, but from the opposite side. So yeah. And so, like, I always it's always like a a game of, like, trying to explain one side or the other side depending on which so I have, like definitely my audience sometimes is a mix of people from these two two sides. Like the crypto curious
socialists or the socialist curious crypto people. Yeah. I mean, there's few things that, have elicited such a tremendous response from people on the Internet. You know, of of all these sensitive political topics that I've dipped into, it is I think people are most allergic to the blockchain stuff. I and I mean, I think in some cases, understandably so, because a lot of these things are just, you know, very annoying and, like, technologically burdensome and and whatever. But, yeah, I I do kind of feel like the need to have, an explicit detailed conversation about what the breakdowns are, especially within creative economies. This was made really, really clear to me a few years ago from the art world, you know, which is my my background in this stuff where a lot of my peer group, we came into that world, in the midst of a market bubble. We didn't know that at the time. I mean, the kind of the writing was on the wall, to be honest, but, this was our first experience with it. And so the idea that you could have graduated two years ago and now you're living as a full time artist off of the sales of your work, That was just that was the only reality we knew. And that sustained for a few years where, people who were making things that were unsellable and, you know, maybe got some traction online through a few blogs and tumblers and things like that then became these immensely valuable artworks that were, you know, the the degree to which their value increased could be, you know, more than a 100 fold in some cases, you know. So a painting that was unsellable. Are you are you are you talking about NFTs? No. No. No. Well, I'm drawing an analogy. Absolutely. But I'm talking about, in this case, physical paintings, artworks of all sorts that would, you know, through the secondary market, like spike up to, you know, one of our peers from this, a tumbler that we used to run back in, like, '20, let's say, 11/12 to '14. His paintings went up to a $100,000 on the secondary market and then immediately dropped off. But, there's a classic example. I don't wanna I don't wanna this guy's just he's been through so much of having his, market spike up and down. But, the classic example is that there's a painting that's traded between six collectors within a period of six months, which is initially purchased for $10,000, sells in the secondary market for a $100,000 six months later. And then when it's put up for auction on the seventh time, it doesn't sell, and the price crashes of all the work. So he's since recovered, has a career where he shows work, but the price has never reached that massive speculative speculative valuation in the beginning. So all of those things are, not unfamiliar to people who came from a background in the art world. You can, you know, watch the price of a rising asset and, you know, its ups and downs, and it's kind of insane. But living with that reality several years later, I know a lot of people who bought houses or retired from that work. And then the people who, like myself and many of my peers, who did not capture a big slice of that value through the rising speculative asset, we work every day, all day, continue to grind out in the culture minds. And so if there had been, you know, a split of, like, even a fraction of a percent, you know, of, like, a 1% redistribution on collaborative projects that then, you know, later created these immensely valuable assets from individual artists rather than a group of people who had been collectively working on something, that money would have sustained many of my peer group in the the years where the art market was a total bust. You know? Even I've actually I've done the math on this quite a bit. Like, a 1% redistribution of some of these assets would have floated the entire group. So it's it is immensely, immensely unequal. And, you know, now we see this explicitly with the NFTs because you can just look at the price. It's all public. In the art market, a lot of it happens behind closed doors where something goes from $400 to $40,000, and you can just make more of them. And it's, you know, there's no that a lot of these things are it's kind of unclear how big the addition is. Like, is this, you know, one of 10 or one of a 100? And and people are, you know, very opaque with that information. But in in the early years, there was, the best example of this is a site called ArtRank, which would create a, you know, these are the hottest young painters to buy or the young sculptors or whoever else is doing well in the market, in a bracket of 10,000, 30,000, and a 100,000. And what you would see is that they kind of updated every quarter or so. Part of what they would scrape to create that speculative valuation was the, social media impact of the work and the associated artists. So it is, you know, just a true fact that our entire peer group, our online activity was crunched to create the speculative valuation for one individual's work. And so there is a fraction of that value that is that was produced by all the people who are, in some cases, literally collaboratively building artworks together in terms of, like, fabricating it with their hands. In other cases, coming up with the ideas and and things like this or producing the essays that then became the legitimation of why this work is important, created the argument for it. And so now looking back at those things, it costs a lot of friendships and collaborations. Some people don't talk to each other anymore. Some people had to, move away from New York. Some people had to leave the country because, you know, it's it's kinda hard to rebuild your market after it increases tenfold and then crashes. That that can end a lot of people's careers. It also saps them of the spirit of the desire to do art. And so I just I look back at that period, and I think if there had been some kind of more equitable split that everybody was attached to, like, when this thing sells and resells that everybody gets a tiny slice of that value, it would have prevented a lot of people from having gone bankrupt, having to leave the profession, and it would have made a lot of people happier and provided the right incentives to collaborate in the future. So I think there's real opportunities to do that stuff now, you know, and and and it's not happening.
Yeah. So, I mean, like, this is, also prevalent in, like, the left wing podcasting, like, economy. You know, whatever which is essentially, like, 90% Patreon subscriptions. But, like, right, there are, like, we're sort of just I feel as far as, you know, the culture left culture, left culture worker as I am, I guess. I feel fucking weird saying that. Like, you know, you have, like, the really big left wing media people, like, I mean, just like there's Chapo Trap House, for example, who make, like, a shit ton of money. And this is not me, like, shaming them, like, oh, you should be giving me, like, some of your money or something like that. But it's like we're sort of, like, allowing these platforms like Patreon to sort of, like, administer. That is the organization. It's Patreon, the platform. Yeah. It is. And we're not allowed we're not, like, creating any sort of, like, shared infrastructure for preventing the things that that like you're talking about.
It can I just, jump in for a second on this topic of Patreon as the organization? I think it's it's very strange how, like, essentially, these pseudo political organizations, these, like, media companies that are setting a, an agenda. Right? Give you an analysis saying this is the person to vote for. This is the protest to attend. This is the activity, the political action to take, whatever. It is very strange that, you know, this thing is built on, Patreon without, you know, anywhere else to go from it. So I think what is, useful, to move those groups of people to have these new, subcultures and and communities that are collecting online is that, as I've learned through Do Not Research, which begins as Patreon into a Discord, into a podcast, and there was a whole variety of, you know, hundreds of contributors. Organizing cross platforms with a NFT as your membership card is actually a really useful thing because, you know, otherwise, it results in me having, say, a 150 row spreadsheet with points of contact across seven different platforms, you know, on Venmo, PayPal, Instagram, Discord, email, well, whatever. So yeah. Yeah. The the ability to organize big groups of people independent of platform infrastructures could be really, really valuable for, you know, calling on people to undertake a specific action and so on. Did you use, you used NFTs for do not research already? No. No. Well, this is, we do it for channel. So there's, the channel season zero NFT will port you into, the Discords and the RSS feed. But for that is that is one of the things that we will eventually release is, we may end up using guild.xyz as the infrastructure for portable membership because they've done a really great job making those tools. But, it just it's it is, I mean, at this point, many, many hours of, attending to spreadsheets to have points of contact for people and, yeah, a lot of administrative work that goes on behind the scenes. Yeah. So I'm I'm using,
Guild right now for Breadchain as a way to sort of keep up with, like, membership within within, that.
But indeed, like And how has that has it's been working
successfully? It's still early. Like, the only thing we've only been playing with it. We only have for example, if you're in the crypto leftist discord then and you are have one connected your wallet with the guild and you maybe purchased one of the NFTs related to the bread chain, mirror for the articles that we publish or something like that, then you'll get a roll. Also, if you mint or if you bake, at least 10 bread in our crowd staking application, which which you should go do if you haven't done that yet, then you also get a roll in there if you connect with the guild. So we're just it's sort of like I'm still just playing around with it in sort of non consequential ways as a kind of experimentation ground, but I think there is a lot of, I mean, a lot of potential that you can that that we can do with it. I mean, the one thing we do have is, I think, a a token gated channel, like, only for people just for bread holders. So if you did if you've done at least 10 bread, then you're a bread holder, and you have an extra channel. It's, like, very non consequential, but, like, it it's the the beginnings. It's like the, you know, the germinating seeds of something that could be a lot more interesting, if you were more creative and also if I had more time to think about and and do all the things that you could possibly do with that. But indeed, like, right now, I just have I I just use Patreon and I'm kind of I just rely on Patreon to handle everything for me because I I don't want to add any more platforms. I don't want to, like, I'm trying to, like, keep it just at Patreon and then whenever I want to make that switch, I'll make that switch. But at the moment, just keeping it there just to keep it simple for me.
Yeah. Yeah. I wanna do, because I think I I haven't totaled up. I'm gonna do an update for, I'm on Patreon as well. I I should mention in case there wasn't, explicitly said before. And that is a very kinda easy way to have, like, basically a paid newsletter. You can send information to to all the people at once, But, there are certain limitations to it Indeed. Yeah. That are, you know, just a technical question of, like, it's difficult to port people over from having a Discord role into, a private RSS feed. Like, you can't actually connect those things. You have to connect it through Patreon, and it's just, it's you kinda get locked in, you know. So there's limitations to what you can do for people, and who you can invite into a community without having to send them through Patreon and and all of that stuff. But I want to eventually I mean, we're at the very early stages of this, but I kind of feel like the way that Internet and cultures in major metropolitan cities have, unfolded in the last few years is that, people are more highly attuned to specific communities that, have, you know, relatively more niche interests and, to do pop up events. For example, like, I would I would love to have a system where your membership to this organization is extremely affordable. It's just a $5 thing to get in, and that gives you access to all these online communities. So you're getting the people who really care about the thing. $5 is a very affordable price, but it keeps away the people who are just there to troll or don't really care about it. And then that NFT brings you through all of the platforms, the RSS feed, entry to, private events like physical IRL events where that's your you know, as if you were showing up to a club that was a member's only night. All of those things become, I think, very, very interesting for this new period of creative life in in the cities where we don't have the same infrastructure of tiny galleries and project spaces that were there when I was, coming up in the city, like, you know, ten plus years ago. It's just, you know, much less affordable to be able to have no one has a spare room in New York. There's not apartment galleries anymore. So, I think one of the answers to that is to organize these digital communities and then to have these IRL pop up events where people get to meet each other and so on. So, yeah, I think that's going to become one of the ways that these tools get utilized to, to better degrees. Right. And just like and that, like,
being able to do that collectively with other with, like, other like minded people and to be able to, like, encode a type of, like, solidarity. So, like, one of the one of the concepts that I'm playing around with through Breadcrane is the idea of solidarity primitives. So, like, taking this idea of financial primitives that that DeFi uses as, like, you know, money Legos or whatever, but instead automating the kind of, like, solidarity that you could do with with that same infrastructure, I think would be very interesting. And, you know, if, you know, big bigger left wing media companies or groups had done that from the start, then there potentially would have been, like, a much larger, like, more resilient, network media network or that could sort of, like, have the resources to spin off sort of other types of collective endeavors. But at the moment, it's sort of like I not not that I'm like I I I don't believe in, like, shaming people what they do for their money, but, like, we don't know what, like, these people do what people do with their money. And maybe, like, it actually they want to do something good with it. They just they don't know what to do with it because they're alone. It's their money, and they can't do it individually. Like, Hassan Abi is, like, a millionaire, but, like, what is he gonna do with his money? Like, I mean, maybe he's doing he probably is doing something good with it, but I I can't say, like, that for sure. Well, I I mean, I I do think it's also
for from the left perspective, the left media perspective, it looks like these brands are enormous. These, like, big channels that are you know, you just look at the breakdown of earnings on all of these, you know, big platforms, Twitch, Patreon, whatever. And then it's like, oh my god. It's like a 100 to one, a thousand to one, the people at the very top, and then there's just infinite, you know, struggle rappers as they call them on SoundCloud trying to promote your mix. But, in the scope of, you know, versus MSNBC or Fox News or whatever, these are like drops in the bucket. They're not even visible. You know, we're comparing, like, Mars and Jupiter. We're not comparing Mars to Earth. You know, these are things that are just in quantitatively different categories. So if, you know, what came from these things after a few years of of running it was, like, you know, sufficient investment to start a new media network, that had left wing messaging that was accessible and then reached the necessary audiences, that would be totally sufficient to me. But, yeah, at the moment, it does seem like, there's not a new vision beyond just the infinite treadmill of podcasting and content creation Yeah. Which is, I think, in in an insufficient vision for what these things should be. Right. Because, you know, as one would imagine, like, parties of the past where you have a political party and then they make the newspaper and the newspaper sends the message out to the people on the street. People in the street find the newspaper then find the organization. Like, this is what media is attempting to rebuild. This is the whole point of why, people with political inclinations care about media is to eventually build the coalition to see the to create the change that they wanna see. So, yeah, I do think we have to consider it in in those cases. I think maybe, Jacobin is about the closest thing to understanding that pipeline of politicization, informing people, but, essentially, Jacobin is, I think, creating discursive and intellectual pressure on academics, journalists, consultants, things like that. It's not focused at the, you know, I want the thing that has the cultural soft power and the influence to hit those kids at, like, age, 16 when they're they're getting into politics in a more serious way, and they're starting to care about these things. And they're getting a lot of, like, basically right wing nonsense and confused ideology in their news feed. I want something that can compete with that and can win over their hearts and minds. So I would be I would be happy to see that happen in the next few years. I I don't know if anyone is thinking Teen Jacobin. In this kind of big, teen Jacobin. I don't know. That sounds I think
would it work? Would it work? I mean, I think they need definitely a rebranding. But, I mean, to to to your point that is To you, Jack. It's really funny. That that that's sort of like I think how I felt with what I like that that's a whole like reason why I started Breadchain a bit is just like I can't just I can't just, like, talk about it. Like, especially in this, like, weird niche where, like, a lot of people don't at at the surface don't like what I'm doing or what I'm about. That there is, like, like, there has to be a pipeline from, like, listen to the thing, be inspired by the thing, and then go do the thing. Like there has to be like that pipeline and that's sort of there needs to be some sort of like ecosystem of different like it's not about like we need to create one funnel to do, you know, everyone goes here, but that there's like where people can come in and, like, find their place in the ecosystem.
Well, it's gotta lead to something because I think what we're seeing now with these big, media brands on of the left, persuasion in in the, the political landscape is that they've devolved into fandoms, and the people who spend a lot of time in there are actually not interested to do the political work or to have their, you know, difficult conversations. They evolve very brittle world views where their ideas don't stand up to the test of reality. If they go into debate with someone who has a different, you know, framework or set of ideas or a different background, they immediately get very upset, and they kind of can't communicate the talking points. And that is just not, like, doing the important work that needs to get done. And that's, essentially, you're talking about an adult babysitter that keeps you company. You know? This is not a political education anymore. And so I think it's incumbent upon us as people who see some potentials in this type of media work to build the infrastructure to then create, you know, in my case, it's an arts organization. It's not a political movement at all. But, you know, the idea that, like, a political organization can be literally an email list or a, arts organization can be an email list or, you know, a a fandom can be an email list. Like, these are the same tools, and there's a lot of implications. So experimenting with that infrastructure now to find out, you know, how how can you actually organize and administer these things is, I think, quite important work. Yeah. So I I think one of the obstacles
in, like, in that vision, I think a big part of that is the sort of, like, politicization of aesthetics, like, certain aesthetics. Especially if if we want to put forth the case that, like, hey. Maybe some crypto tools could be pretty useful in these particular situations in which, or context that we have issues in context in which we have issues in and we can sort of, like, build something better out of that. Is that, you know, I mean, there is like like, for example, if you create an NFT NFT based membership organization, and then the the first thing people like, someone on the left is gonna say, ah, well, you're you're creating exclusivity. You're, like, doing this exclusive thing that, like, is inherently bad as if, like, we don't do exclusivity already at this point on on the left all the time anyways. And that as if we don't want exclusivity in some context.
Yeah. It's like, I mean, what what kind of exclusivity? Is it, like, cost is it a thousand dollar membership to, like, mint the NFT? Is it $5? Is it, like Right. I mean, details are never discussed. You probably want to exclude some people from, like, yeah. I want to exclude libertarians and a narco capitalist from the organization. There's, like, there there's barriers to entry to create, you know, because more things can happen when you have a community of like minded people that necessarily excludes some and includes others. But that is just not a sufficient criticism to say that something is exclusive.
And so so, like but, like, these types of, like, pseudo political aesthetic things are going to get in the way. I think just inherently, it already is. So, like, one of the another reason why I reached out is also because I listened to a recent podcast episode that you did where you interviewed, Young Chomsky. I think he's, like, the the producer of, TrueAnon. Mhmm. Mhmm. But, you guys talked about sort of, like, his his interest in particular in, like, fitness culture, or in fitness and the culture around that, which has this sort of, like, implied right wing political aesthetic to it. Even though it's, like, kind of I mean, from probably our point of view, it's extremely silly thing for, like, people on the Left to sort of, like, to think about people who do who like fitness as, like, inherently going to be these, like, you know, proto fascists or or whatever else. It kind of shows this tendency to kind of, like, seed space that we you talked about earlier of of kind of, like, the political assetization around something as simple as just, like, working out or, like, fitness, which we also see, of course, in crypto. But I thought it was a a a really interesting topic, like, specifically fitness. Is it I mean, of course, that is interesting, but also, like, how it relates to, I mean, so many other things that that seems to be just, like, this huge obstacle that needs to be somehow overcome.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you try to do the, you realize how much you're working against the grain of social media and assumptions and all sorts of things when you do this stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think in general, this has been a recurring interest for me of, like, finding more or less, as I said before, these issues that when they're sliced, along the lines of, like, right left politics can sometimes end up on the wrong side. And, that is, for whatever reason, becomes taboo, difficult to talk about. And, you know, my assertion has always been that this is the most necessary thing to talk about because those are the people who you should be fighting to win over. And, you know, I think what we're looking at now, certainly with the American left and, a lot of the the the way that the media discourse functions is that these are, you know, increasingly narrow slices of the rest of, like, the coalition. It's it's, you know, you you very quickly work your way back where it's like, okay. Anything attached to web three is, evil financial capitalism. Anything attached to fitness is, like, evil, proto fascism. Anything attached to somebody getting paid for their work is like commodifying your, yourself. So, you know, you just infinitely retreat into this space that is, extremely punishing, broadly unappealing to most people, and, I just don't see it building the necessary coalition that is required for a majoritarian democracy. Like, the the point of media is to do outreach and, you know, instead we're in this extreme position of retreat where the point of media seems to be in many cases on the left to, like, punish people who think differently from you rather than try to convince them that you're right. And, those do just they just don't create very strong belief systems where a lot of times, you know, left wing rhetoric and ideas, it just feels very alienating and and, you know, people have not heard this before. They don't know how to understand it. Not everyone has, you know, a a PhD in reading Judith Butler. And, you know, sometimes, there's a necessary outreach of, like, meeting people where they are. So a lot of people are interested in in fitness. I think there's real clear opportunities that you are unhealthy from the food that you eat, which is produced by, you know, having, a lack of regulation and a, a food industry that is run through, a profit motive where they put very cheap hydrogenated oils into everything, which makes you unhealthy and sleepy all the day all day. And, then you have to pay for it because you have a private health care system and you don't have a national health service to to foot your bill. So you're getting kinda screwed at the grocery store and then screwed at the doctor's office. And in all those sorts of things, are real opportunities to to make an inroad into someone's idea of how the world should function politically, but it's, like, stopped at this aesthetic pursuit of, like, you know, things that look masculine or involve lifting weights, or are, like, superficial, you know, that's, like, on the other political side for some other reason. Yeah. So I I wanna talk to the people who have are on a different side of that, that idea and to highlight those those things. And I think that will help to redraw some of the lines Yeah. For these issues.
I mean, to me, it's it's it's annoying this type of kind of policing whenever we already know that kind of like these very far right wing white supremacist groups like they they are the ones going into like maybe these fitness groups or like, you know, these interest groups that are apolitical per like on the surface or whatever and they go and and politicize it or like I think what it is as well, I mean maybe I'm afraid to do this but like to bring in a little bit of the lures but it's like it's this territorialization. It's like this is like the territory of of the right and then the left is kind of like, oh, they said that's a territory of the right. So therefore, that's that's a right wing thing to do now. That's just Right. Which I think is kind of what happened with with with crypto. And this is kind of like a downstream effect of, I think, what you mentioned before, but just like the doomerism of sort of, like, being a a millennial and caring about politics in this day and age.
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's it's very it's it's a little disappointing. I mean, I have, now I think enough of a following that kind of enjoys these things and likes to play with these topics that I've cultivated very intentionally. But in the broader left, these are, you know, really ideas that are marginalized and and frowned upon. But I think, you know, there's, there's all sorts of ways where these things connect unexpectedly. And I I think that is actually the work of what media should be doing. You know? Mhmm. I think that's you know, we have to try and stay to some degree ahead of the the curve to, like, shape the discourse in certain directions. And so, I inevitably find myself drawn to those things, which is I don't know. Maybe, you know, the the rights that the people that we are competing with for members of those groups of, like, a political, you know, say, like, a group of gamers or group of people who lift weights. And then you can enter into those communities and then recruit people to your ideas. And all of a sudden, it sets a narrative that, well, you know, from the very beginning, these gamers were beyond help and it was just toxic masculinity and they were wretched fascists from the very beginning when they became political 14 year old gamers. Yeah. They came out of the womb as terrible, unsavable people. And I I don't know. I think that's why the DKP argument is so, important because Yeah. It's like there were all sorts of opportunities to set a narrative about what these communities could be. And you're just if we're fixated on the rhetoric of what they say, we're ignoring that they've built these cooperative models that are, like, that's that's how all of those communities are organized. DKP is I wanna say it's, like, 90% of it it's a little bit different now because there's been so many patches to the game just for the fucking nerds out there. But at at that time, during the peak of when World of Warcraft was the most popular game in all of history, 90% of the guilds were organized through DKP in these cooperative, you know, socialist models. So the idea that, like, you know, they were wretched, racist, bigoted people from the very beginning is something that the media has seeded. And now what happens quantitatively if you look at these spaces of, there's a few studies, about Reddit communities that are, you know, decried as being a far right space is that just quantitatively, if you watch the membership, once that piece hits the media, a whole bunch of new members influx to the community because they're going there to find that thing. Right? So in this in these examples, we're watching media kind of set the reality. They're hyperstitioning it, if you will, because that is not actually you know, there's an element of that in the community. And then by setting the narrative saying that this is the way that this thing is, you then attract all the people who want that and then you you create that, that reality, unfortunately. So Yeah. I think as people who care about media and setting narratives that we have to, you know, look at some of these issues that are contested, make the case, and then, yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, that has some effect, further on downstream.
Yeah. I mean, just to take the example of me, like, I I posted the the interview from Bridget Wolf in the r/cryptocurrency subreddit. It wasn't that it wasn't a 100% people were, like, shitting on me. Like, there was a lot of people who are saying, like, yes, this is amazing or, like, you know, like, oh, that's interesting. Like, there were there were people who then, like, gained in like, I every once in a while will, like, kind of if one of these kind of news articles pops up, I post it in that that subreddit and then and then I just always I like, you know, I try to comments, like, my subreddits sort of in the comments for, like, people to find a way to, like, you know, to to, like, come to mind. Like Absolutely. So, like, that's that's kind of how my very small attempt at trying to, like, contest this type of, like, space. One small example of of many things. But, like, I mean, I imagine you already agree that, like, the left should be contesting, like, these types of political aesthetics in the crypto space. But I was curious, like, if you had any thoughts on, like, how to do it. Like, what if you have any, like, thoughts on, like, from, like, researching these different online communities. Are there any, like, particular strategies that you that you think are could be good?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for, I'm just gonna take my project as the example here, if that's okay. But, people are kind of allergic to, anything that mentions blockchain web three, just on the face of it because they've had some bad interactions in the past or, like, seen stuff they don't like. So I think what I'm kind of, waiting for is that at a certain point, having a wallet is gonna become very normalized, and it you know, I won't have to tell people, okay. Well, just go get a MetaMask so that you can hold this NFT, and then that'll make the coordination of our or or of our community much easier. I think the way to do it is kind of this example of, like, saying x and doing y where the technology is gonna work seamlessly, and you won't have to say the words blockchain or web three. It's just like, oh, here's your membership card. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, well, this is not attached to a controversial subject. They're seamlessly using the tech, and, they're kind of enjoying the results and that they have, you know, frictionless membership across all these different platforms. So that's, I think, that's kind of the thing that I'm waiting for at the the moment is that, eventually, the infrastructural element is just so compelling in its use case that it doesn't matter what you call it. And then shortly after that, people are like, oh, wait. I was using an NFT membership this whole time? You mean to tell me that I was I was burning the oceans. I personally vaporized every molecule in the fucking ocean. Yeah. Yeah. There's just it's a desert of salt. That's all that's left. You know? I I think that will that will kinda be it. So, you know, if you, just to to give, like, a a silly example, if you attach, like, a Discord role to all of these things, and then having the Discord role automatically airdropped an NFT to your connected wallet, and nobody knew they were working, like, they didn't have to go through blockchain to click a mint button, I think people would be very happy with that technology, and they they would only ask a question later. We didn't we didn't think that when we all signed up for these, you know, like, the,
Facebook and and giant monolithic platforms. You know? Like, it's it's a matter of time, I think. The use case is the most compelling. I wonder how that would be possible just, like, technically. That's it sounds kinda difficult if you want to have. I mean, I guess you just wouldn't have
sovereignty over your wallets necessarily in the beginning where you probably have to rely on it. I'm I'm giving a little bit of a fictitious example. Yeah. Yeah. Because you real you really would have to, but I kind of imagine in this case that there's going to be all sorts of, membership to digital communities will become so thoroughly normalized that you'll be, like, you know, clicking a mint button. It's a little fetishistic even to, like, describe these things as as tokens. And when you draw the analogy to having a membership ID, it's it's, I think, much simpler for people. And and, you know, maybe it says join instead of mint, and then, like, you don't have the implication of, like, monetarist fetishism or or whatever. Or follow.
Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. I mean, it's the same as, like, clicking a Patreon button. And that was kind of how we, you know, conceived of it as channel of, like, season passes rather than a monthly membership. And, yeah, I think that will be, pretty commonplace in the near future. Yeah. Channel, by the way, is super interesting, which I think people should check out if if they haven't already. I was, like, so excited when it came out because I thought, like, this is the example of way of I mean, like, I was talking about earlier just, like, instead of having Patreon as the as basically the infrastructure for your for the left, essentially, except where everybody else also uses it and they make all the money, where you then make the attempt at, you know, starting your own type of infrastructure for that. Yeah. Yeah. I think,
it it is you don't realize this unless you're in the position of being a content creator, but the infrastructure of Patreon is absolutely essential to how all these things organize. Yeah. You know, literally how they're funded and also their distribution network. And then there are, you know, just very clear technical limitations to what that can do. So, it it has been I will say though, the the counterpoint to this is that the pressure from web three has successfully, I think, nudged Substack into offering different types of cross promotion and in some cases, payment splits Yeah. That is not available on Patreon for whatever reason, which is very, very, puzzling to me. What I've seen is Patreon has now kind of they've tried to promote collaborations
like between creators.
But it's it's a meaningless collaboration because there's no payment split to the thing. It's like guys you can solve this. You can very easily solve it.
Yeah. Yeah. But I think I think it's ideological. It's going to put but it's going to put the pressure on them potentially if if there is some sort of, copyable, you know, infra like a smart contract code or or what or infrastructure whatever to create these types of content creator collaborations or whatever you call them, I think it would put a lot of pressure on them
probably. Yeah. I mean, it would seem rather intuitive that, you know, for the payment for the payout schedule of this month just, you know, riffing. I haven't thought this tremendously through. If you do four podcasts a month, the payment schedule for this is that you take, a quarter of that and allot it to the people who show up on this episode, and it just it it seems, you know, pretty straightforward that, there would be pretty direct financial incentives to, cross pollinate with people and, you know, equitable, splits and and so on and so forth. I mean, I have in my inbox right now an email from a recruiter at Substack. So, I mean, I'm I Are you gonna be strategist at Substack? Is I mean, I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I technically have one. It's just a landing page. I mean, the thing that is kind of keeping me on Patreon is that there's gonna be all of this drag in moving the organization because a lot of these tools are not implemented together. So if I had just totally riffing here in NFT, a tokenized membership of people who were subscribers, members of the the media channel, I could just move over where my stuff was hosted and then serve it to the same token from, Substack. That would be preferable. And I wouldn't lose the Discord. I wouldn't lose the the roles. I wouldn't lose their, you know, all their points of contact, whatever.
But, yeah, maybe maybe something for the future. It's like at the moment, it feels like kind of choose, like, choose which I mean, choose which kingdom you want to be ruled under. So, you know, you have Yes. It's feudal. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I mean, we we we talked about this over email a little bit, but, I mean, there is this idea of, like, techno feudalism kind of going around of that we're kind of, like, we are like the serfs on the, the pastures of the kingdoms of Facebook and and Twitter and Patreon and whatever else. And they sort of we sort of pay them rent through our through the money that they make off of our data. And in some ways, this is, like, rhetorically, I think, like, somewhat powerful. Like, if like, whenever you kind of I I think for me, like, the reason I chose Patreon was, I mean, almost entirely just because that was, like, an agreed upon model on people on the left. And I thought that that was my audience. And so, like, I should just do the Patreon route. Yeah. But now I'm I'm sort of, you know, there's I'm locked in to the kingdom of Patreon, like, for this this service that if if if I want The kingdom of Patreon.
Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Maybe to summarize just the roughly the triangulate the position that we're in now is that we would probably both agree that media is important for shaping, political ideation and then people make decisions based on that later on. Right? Someone is going to have, an experience where they have to then make a choice between, you know, on a political issue or, whether to, support an organization or something like that. And then all of the messaging that they've received on the topic up until that point is going to inform the decision that they make. Yes, no, right, left, whatever. And so at the moment, we're in this very weird position where we have, in my analysis, a extremely libertarian realization of how media should be funded and that it is only for profit. All of these, you know, quote, quote, left media channels are exclusively for profit. If any of them take donation to subsidize the cost of what they're doing, they are, counter revolutionaries now for what it for I don't know. Because people are fucking insane. As if we're, you know, larping that revolution is a real force. But, if they were to take a donation from a, you know, philanthropist or a big donor, then they would be compromising their political ideals and, you know, maybe pulling their punches on some of the critiques later on. So what that has created is that, rather than being able to take, you know, certain creative risks and have very complicated conversations, the for profit model of left wing media, exclusively funded by crowd, subscriptions, has kind of nudged, the political education of the current moment into being something that is basically an adult daycare babysitter where a comedian sits with you and walks you through political topics, and you have a very narrow understanding of the world that you are unable to communicate to people who come from other walks of life. So that for me is not an acceptable model for left wing media. You deserve better listener. I think so. I think they do. Yeah. And so I see some potentials, you know, getting off of, like, this $5 model and and other things too. So, yeah, hopefully, we can have some tools and and funding structures that facilitate a better discourse and yield better political subjects at the end, better informed individuals and yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I want to thank you so much for coming on. It's been great to have you. I think if people just look up Joshua Ciderella, they should find you basically everywhere. It's the same across all the platforms, although I am shadow banned to shit. So good luck finding it. Yeah. I heard what is that what is what is the shadow banning thing? You gotta you gotta check you gotta type out my whole name on Instagram. It's I haven't I haven't gained, like, a follower in, like, I don't know, like, a year or something. It's insane. I'm I'm just invisible. Yeah. Yeah. Shadow banned, into oblivion. So I technically exist, but you can find me. So the the the kingdom of Instagram is, Yeah. The shadow band in the kingdom of Instagram. So I'm trying to exit. Just let me exit. Cool. Well, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. This has been a blast. I've been looking forward to chatting with you and I've been, listening to the podcast and it's just it's such a a fun thing to go through these, insane zigzags of topics and it's I find it very generative. So I've really enjoyed listening so far, and I'm glad to finally come on. Nice. Thanks so much.
It's an honor.