Written by: Matti
Compiled by: TechFlow
Anti-social media and Web3 commerce
I’ve long argued that social media is becoming more anti-social. The short video trend spawned by TikTok is not social at its core; an algorithm takes user-generated content (UGC) and recommends it to people. It’s algorithms and random strangers optimizing for attention.
As Web 3 aspires to revolutionize the social media game, it’s worth considering how well it fits into the unsocial trends that have flourished online. While these applications were originally designed to facilitate social interaction, they have instead fostered antisocial behavior that fosters outrage culture, conflict, and over-attachment to idols.
I originally set out to find out how social media became 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 social and business interactions online in the new era.
From social to antisocial
Facebook catalyzed mass adoption of social media. Its success began with the launch of the News Feed, which started as a chat between friends and later became an arena for global 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, or influencers.
Eugene Wei described a transformational moment for Twitter when he mentioned the introduction of ranking tweets by performance in Battle Royale:
"We are now in the post-Twitter era, where almost every tweet is desperate to be favorited and retweeted, and everyone is a trained commentator or comedian. It is full of opinion leaders 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, without posting for likes. People said what they wanted to say, now people say what they think others want to hear or what the algorithms capture.
Why is this an anti-social element?
This is largely a financial capital extraction game
This is a mimicry game designed to provoke conflict or anger, thereby attracting more attention.
It is managed by non-human elements (algorithms)
Performance is not a social activity - there is a clear distinction between performers and audience (at best it is pseudo-social).
Over time, followers and performers of social media platforms become increasingly isolated from the social aspect, without even noticing, and are primarily locked into a self-desire feedback loop. Rene Girard would say that social media is designed to propagate unlimited desire. Social media allows for new patterns of behavior that we might not have been able to predict before.
That’s why social media has facilitated the transformation of hippie culture into 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 actually willing to be influenced and to engage authentically, even if it makes people cringe.”
TikTok introduces the next level of anti-social. It has almost no social element, consisting only of random user-generated content and algorithms that maximize the dopamine users get from the screen. There is almost no intent in terms of purpose discovery, just the dopamine hit of the next clip, which may specify the next purchase task - shoes, watches, one-time relationships or other items.
We are moving relentlessly toward a more antisocial financialized mirror culture, the computer screen, creating a trap in a world of escapist abundance. As Toby Shorin puts it:
“Class mobility may be gone, but at least we can have beautiful things.”
In crypto culture, we are perpetuating one of the great myths 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.
Tik-Tok, a get-rich-quick platform, has already ventured into the crypto space through tokens and NFT recommendations. With the emergence of Ponzi social networks such as friend.tech, Web3 will make the prospect of swallowing up influencers a reality.
Cultural integration
Volatility as a Service positions crypto products (and culture) as dependent on volatility to be relevant. The most important realization is that volatility is a feature of cryptocurrencies, not a bug.
While it expresses hope for speculation as a transitional feature, since crypto culture relies on the flow of money, it will almost never abandon speculation (at least as a user acquisition strategy). This is why I define Web3 as a mentality of Internet users - "come for the volatility, stay for the technology."
But somewhere in between there is a product — but it’s liquid and usually represented by a token.
People fail to 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, that the culture of showing off wealth is first of all a product, and brands integrate themselves into the culture through memes and Internet celebrities.
Today, we are entering a new realm where culture itself becomes a product, and tokens are cultural artifacts that can be acquired.
Web3 Social = Ponzi Social
Crypto is primarily about money and the financial instruments embedded in the web. As Joel John said, crypto culture relies on the flow of money. The influencer era is rooted in monetizing social capital (followers and engagement), which, as mentioned above, could be a match made in heaven.
friend.tech is a speculative social game that is a proof of concept and could be a trigger for innovation 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.
While friend.tech is essentially a remnant of the lifestyle era, as it primarily enables individuals with established social capital to gain more financial capital, it also allows followers to reap some of the benefits. This is how influencer-owned personal casinos started, but there is a way out of influencer casinos. Perhaps there is a silver lining in this dystopian vision.
While friend.tech is one of the first successful applications of Web3 sociality (unsurprisingly relying on Ponzi schemes for its early success), it is an interesting experiment that may introduce more social rather than anti-social behavior.
As influencers become brands in their own right, they are able to launch white-label products from the top down — dumping merchandise on their followers. As mentioned above, the way brands enter cultural relevance is through influencer partnerships and memes. But what if we could collectively own memes? Enter the era of tribes.
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 tokenized culture.
Owny fans
As people have been able to produce and disseminate information freely 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 recording the provenance and origin of ideas, but also direct financial value to the people who own those ideas.” (Aleksia Vujicic on co-creation)
In the past, the product was the main content, but today, the (sub)culture is the product and the product is auxiliary. David Phelps wrote: "Not serious games can be very serious belief systems", and Shorin further said:
“The lifetime customer value of a believer is likely to be greater than that of a user. Founders can easily design a culture with various decorations, upgrade opportunities, and a perpetual extraction model.”
Web3 creates the tools for rapid global capital formation and has the ability to give ownership - a stake in an idea or product. As new tribes or sects form online, they share an idea and the will to make it happen. They don't have to rely on anyone to give them the product.
Especially if they can use tokens to naturally tie their product to 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 the meme coins, these are indicative of 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 how long the game lasts and how sustainable the microeconomics are.
Brands are a form of cult, and now they are starting to be built from the bottom up. The subculture is the product, not from the top down. This suggests that the subculture is used to justify the product. European football clubs are the prototype of this model (perhaps this is why more private capital is looking to enter and commercialize).
If you can’t see the product, then you probably are the product. This is generally true in Web3. Products appear everywhere, tokens rise and fall, some make a comeback, and some are forgotten forever. In the meantime, we spend most of our time being entertained.
Web3 is business
Ethereum itself is a brand. Ethereum’s brand is the 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, not any essential difference.
friend.tech proves that we can actually tokenize almost anything without having to abide by legal agreements that would make this open relationship more formal. Consumer brands sell the idea that you will be appreciated for owning this product, but they never guarantee it. It is this silent promise of status that buyers seek.
The idea behind creator shares is that you will be accepted into your idol’s inner circle, but we shouldn’t ask creators to be diligent in pleasing fans just because they own a share or two. In other words, status is more important than practicality.
Speculative social or SocialFi can be the beginning of “real world assets” that we haven’t thought of before. Instead of thinking about how to put treasuries on-chain, we should think about how to introduce and evolve consumer culture while giving it new forms of products like status embedded in token ownership.
Perhaps we still don’t realize that Web3 is commerce, but rather a novel form of it composed of a new type of product: tokens. Tokens tie together the concepts of culture and product. Products are subjects of reflexive narratives that can change form over time. In the same way that conspicuous consumption is fundamentally a means to achieve certain goals (status, happiness, excitement, etc.), so are tokens.
But there are also more social tribes with specific goals on the market. Today, we also see them appearing in DeSci (Degen Science), mission-driven brands like VitaDAO or HairDAO, where various products and future monetization flow back to token holders.
With friend.tech’s simple casino, we’ve entered a new level of sociality — and we’ve also transformed online commerce into a more bottom-up attribution culture built around token networks. In my opinion, this challenges traditional business views and converts the token’s meme premium into brand purchasing power.
