After more than six years, I’m retiring The Blockchain Socialist. This isn’t the end but what I believe to be a new beginning that better fits the current moment.
I started The Blockchain Socialist in 2019 as a blog, then a podcast, then a YouTube channel, then whatever else it needed to become to keep up with the conversation. The bet was simple: blockchains were going to become increasingly important and the left had no real framework for engaging beyond dismissal, and someone who actually understood the technology needed to make the argument that it was worth taking seriously as more than an object of critique. I believe this ended up being true with the spread of stablecoins, prediction markets, increasing use of debanking by states and acceptance by Wall Street.
I started it from my bedroom anonymously so that my managers and bosses at my very corporate job at the time wouldn’t ask me about it. I had never in a million years imagined myself as someone that would have started a media outlet let alone to have other people give a single care about what I had to say. Taking this risk allowed me to travel around the world to speak countless times at this point, meet some of the leading thinkers in the blockchain space, and write a book.
Here are some of the numbers:
- 204 podcast episodes
- Over 250k plays
- 53 blog articles
- 1 published book
- Over almost 7 years
Not bad for something as niche as this and all without feeling like I had to go against my own principles or morals to grow.
I think one of the thingsI’m most proud of to come out of this is to go beyond just being a channel for commentary but also creating a space for people who want to build alternatives through Bread Cooperative. One of my pet peeves over the years has been channels that criticize without a proper call to action or attempt at alternatives when it’s possible. So please, if you still believe in the mission of this channel, please check out what we’ve been building and bake some BREAD. We have been making some great progress lately on solidarity finance applications built on crypto rails.
Why it’s Ending
Over my time in this space, “blockchain” and “crypto” went from novel to very loaded thought-ending terms. In 2019 there wasn’t much history yet, and the space, while already leaning right, hadn’t calcified into the reputation it has now. Six years of scams, extraction, and bad actors later, anything adjacent to “crypto” causes a visceral reaction by a large segment of people. Funny enough, I think Hunter Biden recently expressed many of my own thoughts on what happened albeit with a focus on Trump. Now, anyone that isn’t already steeped in it, defaults to distrust until proven otherwise, if it is even possible for them to think otherwise given the amount of negative media crypto has received.
The negative perceptions are clearly beyond my control as the incentives to ruin it for everyone else are too strong. The well has been thoroughly poisoned well beyond what I can fix with the micro budget I have available to me (big thank you to my paying subscribers on Patreon over the years). Many of the things that also drew me to the crypto space, like DAOs, are dead or dormant. While I’ve always been critical of the actual reality of DAOs during their peak in 2021/22, it was still truly a generative space at its best.
But new technology itself was never the point, it has always been about the politics around technology ownership. Blockchain was just a vessel for being able to make the argument in public, at length, with technical fluency, that ownership of technology matters. The name instead locked me into defending a category in many people’s eyes instead of pursuing the original argument I wanted to make.
Other things that have happened pushing me to make the switch
- “Crypto” has become the most blocked word on X
- Public goods funding in crypto has depleted dramatically
- My reach seemed to depend in large part on market sentiment of crypto (ironic for a socialist channel)
- I have written and wanted to produce a lot of content that I felt I was forced to make it about crypto whenever I didn’t think it was useful to
- With assumptions based on the name, many people think I believe many things that I don’t (it’s been annoying to say the least)
I’m not retreating from crypto. I’m still building at Bread Cooperative, and more recently at a new venture called Gas Killer. I just now think that given this new media ecosystem we’re in, a new strategy is needed. One that gets people to understand the importance of this technology based on first principles.
What’s Next
First and foremost, I’m going to take a break for the next month. I’ve been putting out content every week for nearly 7 years and I was recently in an accident. I’m physically fine but it reminded me that sometimes I need a break so I can refresh and come back in a more creative spirit. This will also help give me time in preparation for the rebranded platform. I will potentially still be publishing some short form content on my YouTube channel so be sure to subscribe there.
So what will the new direction generally be?
Same format range as before, interviews, writing, video essays, whatever the argument calls for and a broader scope. A return to something closer to my actual background in neuroscience. Some of the topics I have in mind include AI (it’s impossible not to), synthetic biology, peptides, governance, cooperatives, energy, and cognitive warfare. I think a lot of what’s potentially coming will be breaking a lot of the traditional political lines and cryptography will likely end up being foundational to any real defense against potential negative effects.
My politics have not changed. I’ll still be arguing that the left needs to engage with these systems directly instead of only critiquing them from outside, the same case I’ve been making since 2019. Just with a name that can actually hold everything the argument now requires.
Thank you for following me along for the ride so far. I hope you’ll continue sticking around. More soon.
Note: I will likely be archiving this website in some way over time in that I will keep it online but won’t be adding to it to make the transition to what’s next a bit easier.
