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Post-Hoc Myth-Making at Scale

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

The Token Disconnect - Stephen Diehl

After looking at this phenomenon for the last decade, I’ll give what I believe is the first rough draft of history. Silicon Valley ran dry on large breakthroughs in software, so we decided to invent the “blockchain”, a simulacrum of innovation that organically fermented from the anti-institutional themes in the Western zeitgeist to spawn an absurdly large asset bubble with absolutely nothing at the center. There is no there there, and crypto morphed into a pure speculative mania which attracted a fanatic quasi-religious movement fueled by gambling addiction and the pseudo-intellectual narrative economics of the scheme. All conversation around crypto is now simply the sound and fury of post-hoc myth making to rationalize away the collective incoherence of the bubble in a near perfect exemplar of the motivated reasoning of economic determinism.

And:

I suspect history is going to have the same lesson to teach us about the perils of greed untempered by reason.

Hoo-baby!