More than a few years ago, I was on Twitter with the edgiest intellectuals of the day. My views were challenged and my very liberal mindset was fractured through getting owned over and over by racists. I became friendly with a strange cabal of podcasters, monarchists, astrologers, occultists, finance bros, transgender gamers and red/black/whatever-niche pill types and my network started to expand beyond the people around me, who were mostly just my age and made music, into places I never imagined.
But after that happened, which I consider a great intellectual exercise for me and made me rigorous and erudite, I realized that I didn’t care that much about being on Twitter, knowing what is the current event, or hearing the same arguments ad nauseam. So, I deleted my accounts and stopped engaging with basically anything anyone academic or intellectual was talking about.
Thankfully most of my good friends are not the type to care too much about current events or zeitgeist. And I could always depend on girls to hear about the latest trending news - I finally heard about the millionaire submarine, that shit was crazy.
When I needed to present myself professionally as a developer, I took back up on Twitter and made a profile (@shirish_sarkar). But I was very careful not to follow anyone from that old group/world, because now just the idea of reading commentary online makes me feel sick.
As an aside, I really recommend not ingesting anyone else’s opinions online anymore. Obviously I am here presenting an opinion, but I’m telling you, just try your best not to. If you are, it’s best to find someone who is very honest to a fault, very sincere, and demure, almost embarrassingly so. Someone who is trying to seek truth and is unsure of themselves, because truth is difficult to find. Anyone who is loud, brash, bold - they may make a point or two here and there, sometimes a great one, but generally listening to them too much will make you a stupid fuck. And really, the only thing worth listening to others online for is alpha - finance not animal kingdom, ie what am I reading that is leveling me up to prepare for my own victories? So make sure you’re collecting alpha, primarily.
Because I came back online to coincide mostly with the launch of my music label (@geist_us), and because my label is driven in the backend by blockchain technologies, I decided I’d use my personal Twitter to mostly just follow people in niche blockchain communities. This exposed my account to a strange, very cringe side of Twitter, which is dominated by seemingly the most desperate, kind of third-world, Asian energies. Very Filipino. I’m not talking about ‘crypto-adjacent’, cool, educated metropolitans. I’m talking about full-on cryptotards, who don’t know how to dress. In lieu of people who are trying to make jokes or make points, I came to the world of people trying to make a buck, and this was very refreshing.
Anyway, why I wanted to write this is because, I found that I preferred the cringiest, corniest, poverty-stricken stuff that you find in crypto-Twitter so much more than the spiritually draining, frustration-driven, silver-spooned intellectual Twitter. Ironically the horrible and tacky artwork, the shilling, the willful fraudulence, the desperation, all of it feels incredibly genuine in a way that the academics and smarties do not. I hope at least one person reading this can relate or gets what I’m saying. This is not a prescription to go follow or enter crypto Twitter though lol. Consume at your own risk and tolerance level.
I’ve come around on it because I realized a few things, and these took me a while despite being interested in the technology since 2017 now. Knowing what I know technically and philosophically, I believe I have a decent grasp on what the future looks like, related to this field. That’s why I made the label and have built applications within the space etc. What I know is, the meek will inherit the earth, and whatever future comes with this stuff will first be adopted and used by the cringiest azn trying to make a buck long before the western, college-educated will even understand it. To even come close to understanding, from our worldview, you have to remove the ego and ambient white supremacy that clouds our ability to empathize with those we look down on, and some are terminally incapable of this.
The rest of the civilized, western world for the most part still thinks cryptocurrency is cringe, and that’s okay because it mostly is. In some way though, this betrays their ignorance and true misunderstanding of life outside of the west. And, it attracts the biggest idiots and the greatest scammers, so the industry (lol) at large is worth criticizing. It is, of course, a machine for greed for many and for others it is like some kind of academic exercise. However, the have-nots of the world have glommed on to it like a life raft. Crypto Twitter is somehow a reflection of poverty and inequality worldwide, when you get away from the utopians, ideologues, and intellectuals. Being in the west, we have the great privilege to easily humble ourselves by understanding and working within this paradigm.
If you’ve ever walked on third-world streets, you know there’s always someone begging for change and someone trying to hustle you, and a dead cat, and a lady with no teeth, and a bunch of men with no jobs hanging around. I love that these people have turned Twitter into a bazaar, a narrow alley in Fez or an open-air spice market in Calcutta. I’m on their side.