Written by: Matti
Compiled by: TechFlow TechFlow
Antisocial Media and Web3 Commerce
I've always thought social media was becoming more anti-social. The short-form video trend spawned by TikTok has nothing social at its core; an algorithm takes user-generated content (UGC) and recommends it to people. It’s algorithms and random strangers optimizing attention.
As Web 3 aspires to revolutionize the social media game, it's worth considering how well it fits into the non-social trends that are booming online. Although these apps were originally designed to facilitate social interaction, they have fueled a culture of anger, conflict, and anti-social behavior of over-attachment to idols.
I initially set out to find out how social media has become anti-social, and how Web3 fits into the future of anti-social media. But in the process, I realized that Web3 is the present and future of online social and business interactions in the new era.
From social to antisocial
Facebook spawned mass adoption of social media. Its success began with the launch of the news feed, which started as a chat between friends and later turned into a global arena for keyboard warriors.
Social media platforms are inherently designed to compete for likes, followers, subscribers, and other engagement metrics, which are indirect measures of an individual’s social capital. Over the years, these platforms have become adept at converting social capital into financial capital, giving rise to a class of content creators known as influencers.
Eugene Wei described a transformative moment for Twitter, referring to the introduction of ranking tweets by performance in Battle Royale:
“We’re now in the late age of Twitter, where almost every tweet is desperate to be liked and retweeted, and everyone is a trained commentator or comedian. It’s full of opinion pieces and aphorisms.”
While still not the ultimate zero-sum game like Battle Royale, the ability to gain status and potentially monetize is largely anti-social. Think of the boring life updates in the early days of social media, not posted for the likes. People say what they want to say, and now people say what they think others want to hear or what algorithms capture.
Why is this an anti-social element?
This is very much a financial capital extraction game
It's a copycat game designed to cause conflict or anger, thereby attracting more attention
It is managed by non-human elements (algorithms)
Performance is not a social event - there is a clear distinction between the performer and the audience (it is quasi-social at best).
Over time, followers and performers on social media platforms become increasingly isolated from the social aspect without even noticing, mostly locked in self-desire feedback loops. Rene Girard would say that social media is designed to spread unlimited desires. Social media has allowed for new patterns of behavior that we might not have been able to predict before.
This is why social media contributed to the shift from hippie culture to a culture of showing off wealth.
“The authenticity-driven satirical culture that emerged in the early 2000s has given way to a time when people are truly willing to be affected and genuinely engaged, even if it makes people cringe.”
TikTok introduces the next level of antisociality. It has almost no social elements and consists solely of random user-generated content and algorithms that maximize the dopamine users get from the screen. There is almost no intention in terms of purpose discovery, just the dopamine hit generated by the next episode, perhaps specifying the next purchase—a shoe, a watch, a one-time relationship, or something else.
We are moving relentlessly toward a more antisocial culture of financialized mirrors, the computer screen, creating a trap in a rich world of escapism. As Toby Shorin said:
“Class mobility may not exist anymore, but at least we can have beautiful things.”
In crypto culture, we are perpetuating a great myth of multi-generational wealth – the idea of rapid class mobility. Imagine if you could only build a product that combined the two – satisfying anti-social desires while giving the hope of rapid class mobility.
Get-rich-quick Tik-Tok has branched out into crypto with token and NFT referrals. With the emergence of Ponzi social networking like friend.tech, Web3 will make the prospect of swallowing up Internet celebrities a reality.
Cultural integration
“Volatility as a Service” positions crypto products (and culture) as dependent on volatility to be relevant. The most important thing to realize is that volatility is a feature of cryptocurrencies, not a bug.
While it expresses the hope of speculation as a transitional feature, crypto culture will almost never abandon speculation (at least as a user acquisition strategy) due to its reliance on capital flows. This is why I define Web3 as a mentality of Internet users - "come for the volatility, stay for the technology."
But somewhere in the middle there is a product – but it is liquid, usually represented by a token.
People can't understand crypto in terms of existing products, but crypto is a different story, it's very fluid, the product changes with the narrative, but at the end of the day - the token is the product.
In this sense, what you buy is culture and the product is auxiliary. This is one of the arguments I quoted above. The culture of showing off wealth is first and foremost a product, and brands integrate themselves into the culture through Meme and Internet celebrities.
Today, we are entering a new realm where culture itself becomes a product and tokens are obtainable cultural artifacts.
Web3 social = Ponzi social
Crypto is primarily about currencies and financial instruments embedded in the web. As Joel John said, crypto culture relies on financial flows. The age of influencers is rooted in monetizing social capital (followers and engagement), and as mentioned above, this could be a match made in heaven.
friend.tech is a speculative social game that is a proof of concept and may be an innovative trigger for similar experiments in Web3. While the grand intention of Web3 social media is that users own their data and social graph, we may just end up with a better capital extraction game.
Although friend.tech is by its very nature a remnant of the lifestyle era, in that it primarily enables individuals with established social capital to gain access to more financial capital, it also allows followers to reap some of the benefits. This is how personal casinos owned by influencers get started, but there are ways to get rid of influencer casinos. Perhaps there is a silver lining in this dystopian vision.
While friend.tech was one of the first successful applications of Web3 social (unsurprisingly, its early advantage relied on a Ponzi mechanism), it is an interesting experiment that may introduce more social rather than anti-social behavior.
As influencers become brands themselves, they are able to launch white-label products from the top down—dumping merchandise on fans. As mentioned above, the way brands enter cultural relevance is through influencer collaborations and memes. But what if we could collectively own Meme? Enter the tribal age.
Over the past decade or so, social media has inserted a layer of desire between the observer and the product. Web3 can change this by adding attribution. If the former is represented by influencers, the latter will be marked by a tokenized culture.
Owny fans
As people have been able to freely produce and disseminate information over the past two decades, in the future they will be able to own and monetize culture and its fruits.
“Tokens can not only attribute social recognition by documenting the provenance and origin of ideas, but also direct financial value to the people who own those ideas.” (Aleksia Vujicic’s article on co-creation)
In the past, the product was the main content, but today (sub)culture is the product and the product is ancillary. DAVID PHELPS writes: "Unserious games can be very serious belief systems," and Shorin further says:
“Believers are likely to have greater lifetime customer value than users. Founders can easily design a culture with various trappings, upgrade opportunities, and permanent extraction patterns.”
Web3 creates tools for rapid global capital formation with the ability to grant ownership – a stake in an idea or product. As new tribes or sects form online, they share an idea and a willingness to make it happen. They don’t have to rely on anyone to give them products.
Especially if they can use tokens to naturally align their products with ideological loyalty. The only thing more powerful than a cult is a cult with its own form of currency.
Whether it's OlympusDAO, BAYC or all meme coins, these point to a bottom-up led culture where participants have a stake in its success. Volatility is a successful user acquisition strategy. The strength of the culture determines the duration of the game and its microeconomic sustainability.
Brands are a form of cult, and now they are starting to be built from the bottom up. Subcultures are products, not top-down. This shows that subcultures serve to certify products. European football clubs are the prototype of this model (perhaps this is why more private capital is seeking to enter and commercialize).
If you don’t see the product, you probably are the product. This is generally true in Web3. Products appear everywhere, tokens rise and fall, some make comebacks, and some are forgotten forever. In the meantime, we spend most of our time having fun.
Web3 is business
Ethereum itself is a brand. Ethereum’s brand is its strongest moat. At an abstract level, owning ETH is a bet on the increasingly visible consumption of Web3. Perhaps in the future, we will understand that ETH is Nike and SOL is Adidas - it is entirely a consumer choice rather than any essential difference.
friend.tech proves that we can actually tokenize almost anything without having to adhere to the legal agreements that would make such an open relationship more formal. Consumer brands sell the idea that you will be appreciated for owning the item, but they never guarantee that. It's this silent promise of status that buyers seek.
The idea behind a creator share sale is that you will be accepted into your idol's inner circle, but we shouldn't require creators to do their part to please fans just because they own a share or two. In other words, status is more important than practicality.
Speculative social, or SocialFi, could be the beginning of "real world assets" we've never thought of before. Instead of thinking about how to place treasury bonds on the chain, we should think about how to introduce and develop consumer culture while giving it new forms of products such as status embedded in token ownership.
Maybe we still haven't realized that Web3 is business, but a novel form consisting of a new type of product - tokens. Tokens tie together the concepts of culture and product. Products are the subject of reflexive narratives that can change form over time. In the same way that conspicuous consumption is fundamentally a means to achieve some goal (status, pleasure, excitement, etc.), so too are tokens.
But there are also more social tribes on the market with specific goals. Today we also see them appearing in DeSci (Degen Science), mission-driven brands like VitaDAO or HairDAO, with various products and future monetization flowing back to token holders.
With friend.tech's Simple Casino, we've moved to the next level of social - we've also transformed online commerce into a more bottom-up attribution culture built around a token network. In my opinion, this challenges traditional business views and translates the meme premium of the token into brand purchasing power.
