The Legacy of Web3

Web3 is dead, we killed it. But the legacy of the fever dream is still with us.

Few movements have poisoned and corrupted minds quite like Web3 — a techno-utopian fever dream that morphed into a radicalization pipeline wrapped in memes, greed, technosolutionism, and crackpot economics. Behind the "have fun staying poor" swagger lurked something more insidious: a worldview where global problems could be solved by tokenizing everything, artificial scarcity meant freedom, and skeptics just "didn't understand the technology." Because clearly, the solution to society's ills was letting venture capitalists repackage artificial scarcity as digital liberation.

The movement preyed particularly on young men's anxieties about their economic future, offering them not just the promise of wealth, but a complete Manichaean ideology. Traditional finance was the enemy. Governments were the enemy. Any form of centralization was the enemy. The solution? Put your faith in anonymous developers and venture capitalists who definitely had your best interests at heart. And that ended about as well as you'd expect.

This wasn't just about gambling and exploitation – it was about radicalizing a generation. The same patterns of thought that made people vulnerable to pump-and-dump schemes made them susceptible to other forms of extremist thinking. The leap from "the entire financial system is rigged" to "the entire system is rigged" wasn't a big one. From there, it was a short hop to embracing whatever strongman promised to burn it all down. It was the normalization of anti-system politics and provided a permission structure for the economic nihilism of Trumpism.

Perhaps most perverse was how Web3 repackaged financial precarity as liberation. The constant fraud, the 24/7 trading, the perpetual fear of missing out – these weren't bugs, they were features of a worldview the embraced financial nihilism. "Trading is freedom," they said, as young men sacrificed sleep, relationships, and mental health to the altar of price charts. The gambling-like dopamine hits of small gains masked the deeper trauma of watching life savings evaporate in rugpulls and manipulated markets. Yet rather than recognize this exploitation, many victims doubled down, embracing their precarity as a badge of honor. "We're all gonna make it," they chanted, even as their communities devolved into feral digital fight clubs where loss and pain were celebrated as necessary steps on the path to economic freedom. And most of them lost everything, including their future.

And in a bizaree twist of fate, the crypto predators that once preached decentralization and liberation from traditional finance became one of D.C.'s most aggressive influence-peddlers, flooding the political system with unprecedented sums – nearly half of all corporate donations by 2024. The results were predictably corrosive: politicians who once called for consumer protections now competed to promise "strategic Bitcoin stockpiles," and bespoke regulation. The movement that claimed to stand against centralized power had simply created its own corrupting power center. The paralyzation of Washington by crypto money, even in the face of spectacular frauds and market crashes, is a symptom of deep systemic rot caused by the corrupting influence of money in our political system.

When Trump stood on stage and declared that he was "your retribution," he was speaking the same language as the Web3 prophets – promising salvation through destruction, liberation through chaos. The same young men who once dreamed of cryptocurrency bringing down the banks were now dreaming of something far more dangerous: the end of democracy itself and the ascendency of a fascist strongman who spoke the illiberal language and ideology they learned from Web3.

The greatest tragedy of Web3 wasn't the glut or malinvestment or the many lives it destroyed – it was how it served as training wheels for fascism, teaching a generation to distrust institutions while placing their faith in digital snake oil salesmen who promised them the world. And now, as the barbarians gather at the gate, we find ourselves a coin flip away from the end of liberal democracy that they were groomed to despise. This is the true legacy of Web3, the radicalization of young men to Trumpism and the deep institutional corruption of our democracy.