Preface

This article is not about maximalism as it pertains to a single coin or chain. I would like to delineate the concept of crypto or web3 maximalism as a belief in the inherent value of the plurality of blockchain technologies and ideas and the synergistic effects therein. If you were here to figure out whether to be a BTC, ETH, Doge, Ape, or gold futures maxi, this won’t be very useful.

Pluralistic crypto maximalism is essentially about humanism. Crypto is a fairly new field, and has only been gaining traction and public acceptance as something beyond a mechanism for money laundering or the purchase of illegal goods in the last few years. We might put a rough date on this turning point of increased public acceptance somewhere around 2017, when ICOs began to pick up at an astonishing pace, with ~800 ICOs that year. Crypto has seen several bear/bull cycles, but continues to grow rapidly as a field. Ads for various coins and web3 companies can be seen at the Superbowl, and even in fortune cookies (I’m looking at you, FTX). But what is the advantage of the maximalist approach--*the more, the better!--*and how the hell am I going to convince you that this is somehow connected to humanism? Read on.

Pluralism and its flourishing of ideas, experimentation, and seemingly Quixotic ventures (various memecoins, NFT and exotic derivatives, etc) contributes to one of the most powerful and civilization-forwarding forces on Earth: entropy. Crypto pours additional gasoline on this fire with its diverse user base. Attending my first web3 event, I met lawyers, artists, psychologists, product and project managers, frontend, backend, and fullstack developers, mathematicians, event producers, and others from a wide array of disparate industries. I did not notice this diversity of thought or background in the two GMAFIA companies at which I had previously worked or interned.

Diversity of thought is important. It fuses disparate ideas, unlocks oblique reasoning within the interstices between fields, and creates a richer, higher-dimensional solution space which can be leveraged for complex problem-solving. One weakness of the largest, most centralized tech companies is the hiring strategy of vacuuming up fresh CS grads from university--whereas crypto companies don’t really take this approach, and crypto/web3 is scarcely taught at the university level, somewhat like DevOps--it’s a discipline that is learned by doing, and still too young to be part of most standard computer science curricula. This reality tends to attract the most passionate contributors to web3. Not those who go because it seems like a sound career with which to support a family and a mortgage, or people whose parents did crypto and force their kids to follow in their footsteps, but people who choose a risky yet exciting new frontier.

In a volatile industry where many previous economic and financial axioms no longer hold true, we need wild ideas, disparate backgrounds, and passionate builders to solve novel problems. Passion is, in this author’s opinion, the ultimate nootropic. Radical thinking is needed as a survival strategy.

This kind of problem space currently doesn’t have many ivory towers or glass ceilings...yet. A well-known element of crypto is the anonymous community. Many brilliant anons are self-professed teenagers, dropping hot takes on Twitter or day-trading or creating digital assets and selling them with no corporate W-2 or parental permission. Whether this is true or not, the opportunity to contribute anonymously underscores both the potential for diverse contribution, and the synergy of contributors in the space who may not otherwise feel socially accepted due to their age or other demographic characteristics. Web3 escapes the homogenizing, centralizing tendencies of the US tech scene because crypto is not centralized to the US. Consider how much of tech is centralized to a few powerful American companies and universities.

Let’s not forget the humanism of the decentralizing tendency of blockchain technology and decentralized web3 organizations, whether technical, like many blockchains, or socio-technical, like DAOs. Distributed compute, distributed resources, distributed social power, and distributed responsibility puts more power in the hands of individuals. While there’s plenty of VC funding in web3, there are still countless organizations that disperse power, like the many grant-funding DAOs--in contrast to the existing model of aggressive-growth, shareholder-driven startups that are often portfolio items in a diversified investment fund. But do read the fine print--not every crypto company or organization is truly decentralized, and there are countless DAO structures with varying degrees of centralization across a spectrum. DYOR.

Let’s recap why web3 + crypto maximalism can be viewed as a more humanist endeavor than the current powers that be in tech:

• Diversity of thought and background in contributors leverages cross-disciplinary knowledge, creating richer solution space for problem-solving
• Welcomes anonymous contributors who otherwise wouldn’t participate
• Risky new frontier pulls in the most passionate contributors
• Non-US-centered movement pulls in far broader global community
• Decentralization of technological and socio-technical structures pushes power to individuals, not shareholders, accruing more value for contributors and community
• The very need for a broader swath of humanity to generate radical ideas for unforeseen new problems, and less hierarchical, more distributed social structures, as well as welcoming nature to outsiders and non-tech people creates a far more inclusive social onboarding experience

It is my hope that this article has taken a reasonable stab at defending its somewhat audacious thesis. Of course web3 + crypto is not humanist in the sense of one giant pile of puppies and rainbows where everyone is given a free club t-shirt and a freshly-baked cookie at the door, but that web3 + crypto is humanist-leaning in a structural sense, and it is my aim that this article has given you an idea of how it accomplishes this.

P.S. For a bit of levity on this topic tempered by empathy and a deep understanding of the crypto zeitgeist, please enjoy Vitalik’s In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism.

Thank you for reading, and feel free to question, comment, tip, or shit-post the author: Twitter: @morganjweaver | Other stuff: morganjweaver.eth