For a Lack of Imagination
Reinventing and retelling the narrative of crypto. Please reach out with any thoughts, critiques, or further reading on Twitter.
Across all species, the human ability to imagine is unique. We can comprehend the past and the future, because we can imagine. It gives us the ability to conceive of abstract and higher purpose, to picture the world beyond our immediate surroundings, and to question the world more broadly. It allows us to dream big about how we might change the world. For founders, their job is to actualise figments of their imagination, pushing the world forward bit by bit. This is the greatest feat of human ability: imagining something into existence.
We have always shared slices of our imagination through media. This began with oral storytelling, moving to photography and film, and now, stretching as far as immersive mixed reality. Documenting one’s imagination opens up new possibilities for others. We have a mental crutch: the adjacent possible, the concept that when you ground people in one concept, they can extend it, but it is hard for them to conceive of the initial concept. This is why when we talk about up and coming technologies, we often use sci-fi comparisons to describe it, to benchmark in something concrete.
When we see innovations in sci-fi, we are often impressed. However, there is no drive or desperation to try it for ourselves, it’s all about the novelty, not the utility. Even when we have the technical capability to make these things, there is no demand for it and many sci-fi inventions live on as sci-fi only. Think of AR, first popularised in William Gibson and Neal Stephenson’s books before being visualised in Iron Man and other movies. To this day, AR has not taken off even though we have had the technology available for decades. Big tech has tried to launch it again and again, with Google Glass, Meta’s big bet on Oculus, Snap glasses, etc. As cool as it these were, those that bought them did for the sake of novelty and they faded out of usage after a couple months. But still, out there are still many hopefuls betting on AR taking off. AR is a sci-fi technology through and through.
Are there some technologies that are fated to live in our imaginations because the world just doesn’t need them? For example, when we read Snow Crash, most of us are more scared than excited by this metaverse-fuelled future because the technology distorts our perception of what society should be like.
Not all sci-fi alters our world so drastically, many do not require paradigm shifts because they are simply incremental improvements on existing tech. For driverless cars, people are excited because the utility is clear and the benefits are great. However, we often underestimate the high barriers to switching that most people unknowingly harbour. The cost of abandoning a functional solution in favour of an unknown alternative, no matter how appealing, is often too daunting for a small increment of improvement. We see this with driverless cars, where they are reaching being on-par with human accident frequencies, yet every time we see any negative press like a death by driverless car, the comfort with this technology goes back to square one. Until they are 10x better than human drivers, it is unlikely that they will take over our roads.
Crypto has suffered from both bad depictions in sci-fi and offering solutions that are basically on-par with existing ones. It is hard to describe the theoretical benefits of solutions in crypto to the average person who has no background or desire to understand. When we get excited about technosolutionism, we often struggle to communicate that excitement to people and crypto has suffered from our repeated failed attempts. There is a narrative that crypto applications are a solution in search of a problem. There is another narrative that blames the lack of apps for the lack of infrastructure, and the lack of infrastructure for the lack of apps. There is yet another narrative which is that consumers don’t want what crypto companies are offering today.
However, maybe the correct narrative is that the technosolutionism of crypto is scary. Why would a government want an open financial system that they cannot control? Why would a private individual want verifiable, on-chain identity accessible by anyone? Why would a consumer want trustless protocols when we could instead have a trusted company to blame and sue? We have intellectualized all of these solutions with our utopian imaginations, picturing some brave new world where everyone is an alpha, smart enough to understand why it’s so great that blockchains are immutable, decentralized, and permissionless.
Most people don’t care about the principles that crypto-natives seek. They are most comfortable in commercial hierarchies, with corporations to blame when things go wrong. This is what modern day corporations have done so well, they create an opaque brand and accumulate trust, and soon this brand becomes a proxy for trust. Few people understand how their money gets moved, yet they trust their online banking app to display their correct balance. Consumers, including ourselves, are dumber and lazier than we would like to admit. We trust these brands because they have proved stable, but we also trust that if anything happens, our legal system will hold them accountable. The recent SVB crisis is a testament to this. Consumers do not need to know, and they do not want to change these habits, unless everyone else does first.
The narrative of crypto has been bulldozed. We need to prove that crypto isn’t as demonic as recent media has painted it to be. There is such a strong community — a cult, around crypto. We have a collective belief in a better world, and use our conviction to dedicate our lives to bringing alive a part of that future. Most industries do not require this level of conviction. Something like AI is a technology that slots right into our current day paradigms. AI leads to advancements across the board, including in crypto, but it is not a philosophy. The draw of an industry like crypto is that it is deeply alluring to few, because the scope of your imagination must be exponentially larger. I hope to see a future where we resurrect the narrative around crypto in our collective imagination. We need to reinvent and retell narratives that make us imagine more.