there’s this whole fuckin thing about “mission driven companies” and all this LARPing about how you need to “have a narrative” or whatever. And these coaches running about like Founders need to be Gandhi. Usually around some consumer brand that literally doesn’t matter at all
An AI wearable. Shopify for dogsitting. another advertising optimization platform
and there are a million consumer brands. that also don’t matter at all.
employees to some extent are basically putting off their family formation to work for your start up so the metaphor is that you have to “deploy” and go to war basically. Because that’s what living in a closet in SF is, working 14 hours a day and coming home to a zombie fent guy limping around with a screwdriver.
And for what? to sell fucking enterprise saas? That’s why you need ’the mission'.
And – if you are like I am – you view people who buy into this concept as fundamentally delusional. But delusional people – to cynical investors are ‘cheap’ because they don’t need a lot of equity.
I’m pretty old and I don’t relate that well to my generation. I’m not Robin Pattinson good looking enough to just straight faced say “I view myself as Gen Z” - but yea, I understand the absolute nihilism with which the world is viewed. It’s medicare fraud and tik tok reels, dysfunctional infrastructure, living w your parents
whatever ‘grand purpose’ an enterprise company. or a consumer company has, is in a sort of vortex of meaningless. What Morpheus said to Neo comes to mind
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.
And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
To me - crypto is basically about The System. I made enough money in the trad world to escape, to a limited extent. But there was still a genuine desire to make something of value. permanence. Legacy. These concepts don’t go away just because you look around you and don’t see them.
A man who lost his sight still remembers what the sun looks like. Though it may fade and warp. The desire to see remains
But thus, there is the truly existential question. “Isn’t anything I build inside the Matrix inherently just part of a system I despise?”
And the answer is quite obviously, yes.
Because anything that you build in the system is subject to the tax authorities that elevated Jeffrey Epstein to the top of society. That pretended like the Consumer economy means something or is an arbiter of personal worth. That invented the Woke mind virus not even because they believed it but because it was a mechanism to control the Peons.
The reason to be in crypto is simply because you do not believe that the people who invented the System still have the right to control money.
So there’s a certain irony around the System willingly adopting crypto that creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Blackrock did QE for the Fed - and yet it presents Bitcoin as an ‘institutional revenue driver’. And all of this kind of gets sanitized into words like “Flow to Stock Ratios”.
Like there’s some kind of formula to govern the insane sentence, “The world we’ve created is incoherent, collapsing and we are reverting to different definitions of value - not limited to but including digital scarcity because everything that is holy has lost its meaning”
People in crypto sanitize it too. “Digital Ledger Technology” DLT. Tokenized Stocks. Real World Assets (RWAs). A whole song and dance to pretend that what is happening isn’t a degeneration of capital markets into a whirlwind of speculation only allowed because the US government has lost the fiscal and monetary plot so badly that we need to allow this to happen.
Everything in the fiat economy, is a sand castle. It has no meaning. It is taxed by evil people and benefits an absurdist materialism that has been obsolete since Kurt Cobain wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991.
It’s been slow and systematic decline since. A tide is coming. It will wash away all the fake value. Anyone with eyes understands it, including the people who architected the system, and they’re not building sand castles either.
They’re sponsoring Blackrock to let them buy bitcoins. Maybe Z Cash too. Whatever is helpful to get out. It’s not utility as financial rails for the system. It’s a recognition that the system itself is rotted, decrepit and incapable of having real missions. A critique. A rejection. The sound of a candle extinguishing as the rain pours against your window, the wind howls, the power flickers and suddenly you’re in complete darkness
flick, snap, boom.
the storm is upon you. it is all encompassing. and the only question is not how good that candle smelled. it’s “how good is your architecture and is your house going to survive this thing?”
AI might help you build it but it’s not getting you out.
That’s why it’s so ridiculous to me that people “pivoted out of crypto”. How do you believe any of this and “pivot out”. This isn’t the movie. There’s no blue pill. There’s only willful ignorance. You can’t forget it once you see it.
The performative founders look like paid actors. Because they are. The society where ‘mission driven’ founders makes sense no longer exists.
You’re forward deployed? To what fucking war anyone believes in?
People want to pretend meaning exists in the decaying system so oligopolies periodically acquire the narrative monkeys to pretend the show is still going. When really it’s regulatory capture, proximity to the money printer, and the fiscal machine that determines outcomes
yea. fuck that.
The only meaningful mission is building the most pristine and functional life raft
I’m reticent to even call what’s coming a bull market. The same way I wouldn’t call a deafening microphone feedback screech music. It came from music that was set up incorrectly. How far can it go? How big is a black hole?