Why we need more stupidity
It's how we onboard the next million users
If Crypto wishes to onboard the masses, we need more stupidity. Not less.
Crypto is a magical place, and things like Hamster racing gambol coin are the absolute best marketing the space could possibly ask for.
They create opportunities for people to immerse themselves in a novel subculture, foster vibrant communities, and achieve the virality necessary to attract the next wave of crypto enthusiasts.
This is something we cannot achieve by lecturing them about finance or why cross-border payments are currently inefficient.
People are already bored, lonely, and looking for an escape.
And telling them they are dumb for buying coins named after dogs or frogs or make-believe creatures that are painted blue and run really fast is not helpful at all.
This is just what human beings are and what we’ve always done - place value on entertainment that allows us to temporarily escape the mundanity of life.
When the printing press was invented, do you know what the most popular books were?
No, it wasn't the works of Aristotle or Plato. It was books on how to spot Witches.
In Roman times when civilisation first experienced abundance, did the masses spend their time pondering the great questions like the meaning of life?
No, they watched people and animals fight to death in the Colosseum and gambled on the outcomes.
When the iPhone first launched, people didn't immediately use it to research quantum physics whilst on the go. No. They downloaded an app that filled up a beer glass when you shook your phone.
And even now, with all our abundance, where we can beam live video of ourselves across the earth in seconds, record 4K video on devices that fit in our pockets, and chat with early stage Artificial intelligences, what do we spend our time doing?
Well, as expected, more stupid stuff.
We are humans. We are flawed. We are dumb. We like stupid things.
But have any of these things stopped the progress of humanity? No, I’d argue that we are so brilliant because of these things, not in spite of them.
Humanity isn't some kind of organised system where only logical, sensible, university, and academic approved things bring about innovation. No, we’re a chaotic mess, a living, breathing, memetic hivemind that moves from one trend to the next based on attention, drama, and entertainment.
But this same hive mind is capable of developing agriculture, inventing electricity, and putting a man on the moon. All directly resulting from our abilities to create virality and culture through shared stories.
So let's stop pretending we are somehow better than the people gambling on the hamsters. They are just like us because they are us.
I can say with near certainty that many years from now, some influential dev, responsible for creating huge innovations in the Crypto world, will have been onboarded because they heard about Pepe, Shiba, HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu, or from watching Hamsters race each other on Twitch.
Let's onboard the next million users by embracing stupidity and making Crypto the most fun place to spend time on the internet.
