The narrators of the "Tech Industrial Complex."

The problem of the techno-determinist mindset.

Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

Jobs instinctively understood the power of narratives. At scale, they become “instruments of political or market power,” as Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk write in “Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculative Technologies.” So here’s my question: who will narrate the future of Web3? Let’s dig in.

Over at least the last 30 years, technology’s relationship with society has been shaped by a narrative fight between technologists and financiers. In Web2, according to Ian Bogost, the technologists successfully framed bankers and financiers as “indolent parasites who made nothing and preyed upon the inventions of others.”

As Web3 has evolved over the last decade, there have been at least three narrators. The first two are:

1. The ideologues, led by Satoshi, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. In the early days ‘Bitcoin’ was pretty much synonymous with ‘crypto’. Satoshi spun a tale of freedom from government control and financial intermediaries through a ‘censorship-resistant,’ ‘self-sovereign’ monetary system.

2. The technologists, led by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, tilted the narrative power away from the ideologues and the beliefs ascribed to the technology, and toward the sociopolitical experiments and practical applications underpinned by the technology.

Now, as Web3 becomes fully financialized, a new narrative star has been born: I wish it were Lady Gaga, but it’s the return of the financiers, and in particular, the Venture Capitalists.

🏦 VCs are everywhere in Web3. Why? Well, it’s illegal to sell an unregistered security, but it’s totally a-ok to sell one to an accredited investor, like a venture capital firm. More than that, the demand exists — a16z recently raised a $4.5 billion round of funding — and the profits can be astronomical.

Okay, so why the shift from technologists to VCs now? Well, Web3 is undergoing a period of what Beckert and Bronk would call “radical uncertainty,” and VCs offer “a road map that helps counter anxiety in the face of uncertainty by simulating possible outcomes and making them feel tangible.” (Do Beckert and Bronk sound like your therapist too??) So, in this moment when the future seems especially unknowable and uncontrollable, VCs are using narrative to provide us with a feeling of control and predictability.

Just talking with the narrators of crypto, trying to figure out how to navigate these uncertain times.

You may be thinking that ever since it hit our newsfeeds, Web3 has always been shrouded in uncertainty and unknowns, such as regulation, the technical scalability of blockchains, or whether ‘ownership’ is guaranteed by law, etc. But it’s clear that Web3 has now hit radical uncertainty, especially if you consider the recent massive market downturn which revealed systemic bugs. Uncertainty is through the roof! Back to Beckert and Bronk:

“In conditions of radical uncertainty — where the set of possible states of the world is unknowable — you have no choice but to rely on imaginaries and narratives about the future. Think of tech start-ups whose value is sustained by little else but narratives of future profits. Such contingent imaginaries serve two purposes: they structure expectations; and they reshape the future by motivating behaviour. In this way, imagination is a root cause of novelty and uncertainty, as well as our best tool for coping with both.”

This level of uncertainty naturally leads to questions about what the real value proposition of Web3 actually is. In response to all this, VCs offer due diligence and investment theses that attempt to “justify and legitimize decisions despite the uncertainty faced,” by regularly repeating such refrains as ‘it’s still early,’ and launching media properties like Future, which promises to be “the go-to-place for understanding and building the future” and practice “rational optimism about technology and the future.” In other words, don’t focus on your precarity or anxiety about the present, look over here, ‘extend your time horizon,’ and read about some great new technological innovations! 😉

So narratives shape our visions for the future and structure our decision-making in the present. But the problem is, VCs are unreliable narrators — and it’s not because they’re out to serve their own self-interests (well, not just because of that). Rather, venture capitalists’ biggest weakness in narrating the future is their sheer undying excitement for technological innovations, which is rooted in a ‘techno-determinist’ belief system. In short, VCs subscribe to the notion that “technological changes force social adaptations, and consequently constrain the trajectories of history,” as philosopher Sergio Sismondo put it.