A generation looks at their way ahead blocked by affluent Boomers and a stuck biosphere. Web3 is their own path
From Salon
What happens when a generation finds its path to the future blocked? It might look to its digital and gaming skills, and decide to build economic systems that value things anew. That’s the thesis that the blockchain guru Vinay Gupta articulated in a tweet thread last week - see below:
The younger generation *suck* at explaining the blockchain. No wonder there's so much FUD in the space right now. Let me explain what's going on, but this time we're going to leave the really important parts of the picture *in* the frame.
You've got to start in 2008 with the global financial collapse. Since then, interest rates have hovered around zero as government pumped cash into the global economy to keep it running.
For a long time, no inflation. The extreme medicine was working. Then covid, and 5% inflation
During that period with no inflation, and tons of money printing, there was very little economic *growth*. If there had been, inflation would have started then - the economy picks right up, credit risk goes down because lending is less risky, and prices start to rise on the cash.
So what happens to people who are turning 20 or graduating college in 2009?
Nothing. Nobody will lend them money to start businesses, VC becomes extremely conservative and risk-averse, and Silicon Valley starts to consolidate. Life is slowly getting harder, and young are v. poor
Actually take a look at this thing:
There's just a titanic concentration of wealth in the hands of older people, and the young are living on scraps. This is absolutely brutal: feels like civilization is going backwards. The young are terrified.
So in this situation what the young need is *economic opportunity* and THEY ARE NOT GOING TO GET IT IN ANY RESOURCE POOL THAT THE BOOMERS CONTROL.
There's just no room to expand: whatever you want to do, there's a tax: boomers control media distribution, VC finance, real estate.
Most of the easy niches in the dotcom world are already taken: people shop, they read the news, they listen to music, they date - and big dotcoms are already in all of those niches.
Nobody is going to overthrow reddit and FB anytime soon - they're solidly locked into place now.
This is a simple problem of access to capital: land, patents, intellectual property, distribution networks for physical products (target, wal mart). The young don't have enough cash to BUY INTO THE SYSTEM.
They're so poor they can't even get exploited. Now do you see BTC's [Bitcoin’s} fix?
BTC allows its adherents an escape from the boomer-ridden conventional economic landscape.
What is bitcoin's core feature? IT'S TOO HARD FOR BOOMERS TO USE.
So you can build an economy for the young, a parallel state to the Boomer Dollar dominated US political landscape.
This is one of those Voice, Loyalty and Exit things. The young complain: nobody hears them. They try and tough it out in existing cultural blocs: still can't make rent.
But to exit the boomer-controlled old economy into the btc/web3 space?
Wow: a huge self-financed bubble grows
There is practically no boomer control of bitcoin or web3. I'm 50, and I'm one of the oldest people in the space - Ian Grigg, David Chaum, Joe Lubin, Don Tapscott, a handful of others - but the old guys are rare and (apart from joe) not that powerful.
Young blockchain frontier. Now, young people, they are not so smart. I was young myself.
They make mistakes. Big ones. Now we have Oh So Many young people running around with a huge pile of capital that they basically created by believing each-other's stories. It's a creative pact.
A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT. So this New Social Contract (NSC), let's examine things like bored apes.
In this contract, kids who grew up with an ipad in their hand acquiring virtual property in games and trading it with friends, go from *renting* virtual property from Farmville to *creating and owning* it.
Why is an ape valuable? The younger generation decided it was valuable.
Why *isn't* this golf course valuable? The people that thought golf was at the centre of the universe are all too old to play much.
This is a generational turnover of wealth, an escape from a locked-up world.
Because there's *practically* no law in (for example) defi or the NFT game. The ICOs ran afoul of old school financial regulation. But the NFTs are bang in the middle of open ground: you draw a thing, the government says you own it outright if it isn't Mickey Mouse. You sell it.
So now you have tons of cultural production - young people making art for young people - but the distribution channel is OpenSea, and that's also owned by... young people. And their fees are light.
The younger generation are Exiting the Boomer Machine to live on their own terms.
25 years ago, John Perry Barlow (I met him once!) wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
Does any of this sound familiar to you?
Now let's discuss the New Social Contract's critics.
Who's getting so het up here? Why all the hatred for Web3 these days?
Let me tell you where the action is: it's the people who are waiting around to inherit their parent's houses who are telling you that this NFT thing is no good and YOU SHOULD GET BACK INSIDE OF THE MACHINE WHICH WILL ONE DAY PAY MY PENSION. Because this "defection" hurts them.
The more the young define their own system with their own rules, the more the old are missing out on the deal. But they're mostly not watching this: Warren Buffet is an exception, and he called BTC "rat poison" remarkably early.
But he's the rat. Mostly, the old missed it.
Then the bridge generation, the one doing the complaining, clogging the airwaves with NFT hate and trying to coerce artists and brands into staying away.
What do they have to lose? The answer is: they're late to the party, and were hoping to WIN AT THE OLD GAME in the future.
The well positioned chattering classes, the media and academics, want to inherit the system that the young are refusing to join and actively working to undermine.
They don't have real power *yet* but they know if the system stays up, in 20 years they'll run the next TED/Davos.
And these slightly younger defenders of the Status Quo are fighting like hell to defend the Status Quo *only because they expect to inherit it*.
If the cultural production system burns to the ground before they inherit, they get nothing.
All the value's skipping a generation.
So when you see somebody wailing on NFTs, ask the hard question: "how old are they, and what is their stake in the old system?"
This is not to say that NFTs and crypto are perfect: young people made them without much reference to the Old Social Contract and they worked very fast.
I was under 30 in the 1990s when I got involved in cryptocurrency. By the time Ethereum rolled round I was one of the oldest members of the team: a stabilizing influence, perhaps. But I was on that side because I had nothing to lose: I had no property, no stake. Open Source guy!
Now I'm plotting a global environmental and economic reform which, even if it works, I will not likely see the end of unless I live for a *very* long time.
I'm working for future generations now.
(I should probably mention myhopeforthe.world which is a rough summary of how I spent my life before lucking into Ethereum and becoming the Launch Coordinator for the 2015 launch.)
(I've been working on plans for making homes for tens of millions of climate refugees since 2002.)