There was a time before when we were used to meet people in person and exchange business cards afterwards or phone numbers, LinkedIn or Instagram profiles. Since Post-Covid, the tendency turned the other way round as our online actions are now mostly predefining our thinking, our habits and are as much real as the physical world.
Anytime I was heading home from work and bewildered by empty streets I was already solving this riddle in my head by assuming people must be at home already in their apartment, flat or house boxes all sticking to their screens building up the metaverse. Indeed, everything digital could be somehow called meta not only since a monopolist like Facebook rebranded but also because we love to constantly create and re-create our innermost, be it on a meta-level above everything else. Where else could we have more possibilities to become who we’re really longing for to be. Friendships that we could have never made due to geographical barriers have now become so much more likely in these worlds on the other sides of our black screens.
Philosopher Alexander Bard describes in his governance mechanism of sensocracy the turnaround of that tendency going first from digital to physical through his term informationism. Why should we ever ask the person next to us for the way – disturb them – if we can just look it up on google maps ourselves? We first gather information online to make an informed decision in the physical world and it saves us a lot of time.
Another aspect Covid has shown us is that followers and Instagram friends are useless and only pretend to be someone they are not. The consumptariat of course is just getting started when it's watching your stories but let go of that hope you'll get any help when reaching out personally to any single one of them via private messaging. In contrary, expect to have a Damocles sword of constant availability hanging above you in the PMs every single day in the week: 24/7. Going offline is suddenly turned into a sign of luxury and independence.
With crypto we added an additional layer to this. The emergence of web3 and monetary exchange becoming one of many communication tools, micropayments, incentivization models, competition of currencies and platforms and the further financialization of behavior is ramping up an inflow of a new kind of trust like we have them similarly within business relationships. In short: We are not in the mood anymore to be blindsided for finance, to be exploited, to have our unpaid work belittled or fobbed off with a simple Like that has no token system behind it. Crypto raised our awareness of how Facebook hires an armada of psychologists to manipulate us, how Linkedin or the non-transparent blog platform Medium force us to post regularly so that the algorithm will eventually provide us with the next gig. We are tired of venting all our frustration about all these platforms on Twitter.
One can criticize the financialization in crypto, however, the change has brought about good changes, in the same way as when capitalism was pushed to the fringes in favor of attentionalism. Acquiring experience and know-how is a prerequisite for recognizing whether an incentive system through a coin or token will really have the positive characteristics of a business, and this is made very difficult both by state institutions and by corporations run in the old style. Freelancers who fight for freedom and independence every day so they can share their practical knowledge away from these forces that are trying to hold us back should be treated with more respect.
When do you want to do your research and due diligence within the corset of a full-time job to find out if you would do good in buying a product or even find out if you're convinced of it? Why would we rely on archaic economic systems that are not supporting those people providing us through their social media channels, reviews, youtube videos and blogposts with valuable information? What are the reasons for feeding a tangible economy every time we exchange values, when in fact we spend so much time in the digital world? Wouldn't it then be wise to assess whether an exchange, value transaction, a company, an economic cycle or even a relationship is incentivized the right way or supported by a solid business model that can improve our lives? How could we check, if our interactions with each other are backed up by any tokenomics at all? Sophisticated marketing and lying aside, why would you vote for a politician and other power brokers every four years if you can now cast your vote instantly in real time through a financialized Like? To say it more positively by quoting John D. Rockefeller:
A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
Cryptoblogging merges both the social and business aspects together in one or as a wise woman once said:
Succeed in a business relation with someone and that friendship will be bond through a special kind of trust forever.
All this preface is less of theoretical nature than of personal experience. I find it very insightful to talk about the process and feelings how it is to connect with someone first through cryptoblogging and curation and much later through social media and yes as you can see in the picture below, we finally met in person and I’m still reflecting on this wonderful experience.
What online connections cannot give us is the silent knowledge a physical reunion contains, but on the other hand our conversation would have never taken the path towards finance (a taboo few talk about) if we hadn´t connected through cryptoblogging with its own logic, tokenomics, decision-making and unspoken truths in the first place. It very much helped that another cryptoblogger @vikisecrets joined us to not only go deeper down the finance rabbit hole but also to answer some of these unspoken truths, specifically and more personally the question why he unfollowed me on @sciencevienna, which then again provided me with insights how my ecosystem has developed since 2017.
Initially, I was about to formulate and elaborate a plan for this blogpost that for the future of sciencevienna I would recommit myself more to my traditional values and offer more scientific content again, but I dropped that. My fitness account @mochita has become a very important part of my ecosystem, although I have stopped reposting and will also in the future handle these two accounts separately (which in the end makes more sense to have 2 different ones), there is no return for me to separate body and mind. According to Alexander Bard those kinds of dualisms (1:06:20) are the roots for many problems and misunderstandings in the first place, also for philosophy itself. As you may have noticed by now, sciencevienna is genuinely different from other scientific accounts here on Hive like @lemouth, @stemsocial or @cyprianj and might probably get closer to @trostparadox and @queercoin. I think accounts evolve and my (crypto) consulting work and client acquisition has had a huge impact on my writing (in)activity. As I recently acquired stable funding for a big research project outside of the sciencevienna hive, but still sciencevienna, I won’t promise to take more time for writing blogposts, but if the time is right, it might happen once in a while.
To wrap it up, it’s amazing how crypto has empowered us to pursue different career paths that not only put communities and commons to the front but also protocols, DAOs and novel entities that we’re still unaware of and lack names to call them properly. Along with building friendships of new kinds of qualities, Charles Kerrigan once said: Crypto isn’t a what, it’s a how
