“Crypto” is notoriously hard to grok. While this is partly a function of the conceptual complexity that’s inherent to the subject — transcending, as it does, disciplinary bounds — it’s also due to the fact that the very concept of “crypto” is itself a moving target; perpetually redefining, evolving, becoming. A quick history here is illustrative. In the beginning, crypto was digital money — “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” . Then it was digital gold. Then it became about the data structure that underpins these concepts, the infamous “blockchain”. As the world was still wrestling with the notion of blockchain, along came “smart contracts” and the idea of a “world computer”. And then in a torrent: DeFi, NFTs, DeSci, DeSoc, DAOs. Because, well, when it rains it pours.

What was once a relatively simple idea — i.e. magic internet money controlled by no-one in particular — has thus become something substantially greater and thereby infinitely less amenable to catchy one-line explanations. Indeed, crypto is now — as appears to be the fate of all popular terms — a veritable industry. And it’s growing (much to the chagrin of many).

Given the semantic evolution of “crypto”, its conceptual expansion, it’s worth asking whether it is any longer coherent as a singular concept, whether it makes sense to speak of it as a ‘thing’ at all, or whether it is now effectively devoid of legitimate meaning, intellectually defunct? If it is coherent, to what exactly does it now refer? If it isn’t, how ought we to refer to this thing — or set of things — instead?

To my mind, crypto ceased to mean anything meaningful as soon as it became incoherent to “believe in crypto”. See, once upon a time, that made sense enough. If one ‘believed in crypto’, one could infer from that — with some degree of reliability — some set of ideas that said person must have subscribed to. Now that no longer holds true. Today, if someone tells me they believe in crypto, I learn almost nothing about said person (except perhaps — and this is a stretch — something of their feelings towards existing institutional power). Maybe they believe in expensive monkey pictures, or perhaps they believe in the idea of a parallel, open and internet-native financial system instead. Either way I’d have to ask.

Recognising the increasing diversity of ideas that “crypto” was being used to represent, the term Web3 (or however the kids are now spelling it) arose. The term “crypto” having been politically and culturally captured, the move to Web3 was a clever piece of marketing that sought to reframe crypto as a more general aspiration towards the “redecentralization” of the web. Web3, subsuming crypto, became the more culturally acceptable cause to believe in. Where crypto was radical, subversive, cypherpunk, Web3 was (is?) a friendlier brand of revolution (less explicitly intent on the end of banks and nation states and so forth). Web3 was crypto, but in terms your mom and dad could appreciate — crypto with a smiling ‘gm’. Something substantially less hatable, in any case.

But Web3 has suffered the same fate as crypto. Not only has it been made an industry of (ew), it’s unclear, at this point, what (if anything) it actually means. In fact, Web3 is even worse than crypto, and *necessarily* — for it must contain, in its meaning, whatever crypto is supposed to mean, too. It’s an umbrella of umbrellas. The worst.

All this might smack as trivial — “too philosophical!” — or perhaps, to the more philosophically inclined reader, it simply points to a more fundamental issue inherent to language as a tool for representing — or producing?! — shared Reality. My personal sense is that it’s neither. Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to believe the words we use are important, and, should they be intended to represent important things, we ought to fight for them — for their descent into meaninglessness is never an inevitability, but a choice, something we acquiesce to.

And so it is with crypto and Web3 — terms that, though I’m critical of, I have a special (and alas sometimes regrettable) sympathy for. Indeed that’s precisely why I’m critical of them — these were things I once believed in, and so I care that they continue to mean something of real import. And so fight for them I intend to.

So when we say we’re fighting for crypto or — god forbid — Web3, what exactly is it that we’re fighting for? To be very clear, to fight for crypto isn’t to fight for Bitcoin or Ethereum, or any other single project, however much these projects may or may not capture the essence of these concepts, or even serve as proxies for the movement’s success. We may fight for such projects too, to be sure, but they’re only particular instantiations of the terms in question, singular conjectures. They’re examples of the movement in action, not the movement itself. Not the forest but the trees.

If one wanted to geek out, we might appeal to the power of ‘verifiable computation’ as the foundation of crypto / Web3. And while the concept may, in the end, get at the technical essence of things, it’s too abstract to really hit home. The human essence of the movement — for it is a quintessentially human movement — would appear to be this: we now have the tools by which we might, as citizens of the internet, collectively and voluntarily co-construct our own networks, our own communities, our own institutions. To be *for* this movement is thus to be for the basic freedom of humans to cooperate in ways they find meaningful — socially, economically, culturally and otherwise. Bitcoin is one expression of this new capacity to coordinate and cooporate on the internet. Ethereum is another. So, too, is the infamous and aforementioned monkey picture project.

Regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of any of these particular projects, the profound point is this: humans are coming together, in real-time, to form their own internet-native political economies. Humans are starting to do, in the digital context, what we’ve effectively been doing forever IRL. New social structures, mediated by new technologies, are emerging. If it’s hard to imagine the implications, that’s because the implications would appear to be determined only by the limits of human imagination. Lofty, yes, but true all the same.

Now to be against this movement, on the other hand, is to be fundamentally opposed to the idea that humans ought to be able to choose when, how and why they construct and share in value together. It’s implicitly an endorsement of the existing power structures, for how else are we to challenge existing power but for the ability to construct power structures of our own?

So here is the claim: crypto is fundamentally a pro-freedom technology. If we abstract away the particulars, the projects and protocols, what we’re left with is human beings leveraging the power of computing and cryptography to do things, together. As a set of technologies, they expand the scope of what’s possible in the human context. Now whether this equates, in the end, to a fairer financial system, a new brand of social media, or — in the most hopeful scenario — a fundamentally improved Internet is, against this higher-order principle of freedom, quite incidental. What matters, ultimately, is that it represents the extension of human possibility (and whatever hope is contained therein).

The thing about freedom, though, is that it not only admits the possibility of “better” — however we may choose to define such a concept — but also the possibility of “worse”. In this way, there’s always a cost to advances in freedom, something we must give up. That’s why they’re always so hard-fought. And of course, that’s why new freedoms are always so tempting to deny. For to deny the forward increment of freedom is to reject possibility and uncertainty in favour of the known. Indeed, the denial of new freedoms is ultimately the denial of change. Crypto and Web3, as extensions of possibility — as extensions of freedom — necessarily expand our scope of Being, in both directions. In this sense, they’re like all technologies. And as with all technologies, there is nothing inevitable about the normative impact of crypto, in either direction. It is — as with the rest of things — entirely contingent.