GM2: Crypto-Attentional Distress
On building slow, talking fast, and curing blockchain’s biggest disease.
Welcome to Group Mind Issue 2. In this blog-letter, I write about how decentralization, data, and design can all help us form a better future. Today:
Crypto-Attentional Distress
Today, like many days, I woke up distressed.
Building in the nascent blockchain space, I often experience this specific condition. Crypto-attentional distress feels like a bad stomachache, but experienced everywhere; it’s a roiling, turbulent sensation that makes my eyes lose focus and my chest seize.
On good days, I wake inside a utopian dream, standing firmly on the moral footing that I am building a more democratic and free future for all. On other days, I am drinking informational Red Bull from a hose gripped desperately by a shaking cocaine addict.
I prefer the good days. Sadly, they’re more the exception than the rule.
The pace of the blockchain space is distressing. But I’m not distressed by the plodding pace at which the technology and products develop, nor by the mercurial pace at which people communicate, narratives shift, and money moves. Each element’s pace follows from its nature, and try as we often might, we cannot slow down social media or speed up bleeding-edge research and development.
What distresses me is that all these elements exist together in constant dissonance - and as individuals, we internalize them all. We are asked to be builders and communicators, thinkers and traders.
The key factor in any worthwhile creative endeavor is patience - the patience to fail at something, then attempt it again; to learn the rules of a craft and establish new ways of creating; to understand your collaborators in order to build something larger than yourself. To make the right thing takes time, experimentation, and the bravery to do it in public. We can imagine that trillion-dollar products and protocols will emerge from these early days of blockchain, but it will be the result of tremendous effort as well as trial and error.
The problem is that we are building in a time when we can communicate faster than ever, through more fragmented channels than ever, and - most distressingly - we can see our products and words valued and exchanged in real-time.
A similar distress occurred in the internet boom of the late 1990s: there was a constant dissonance between the “web people,” obsessed with the creative and democratic potential of the internet, and the “dot-com people”, driven by dreams of attention capture, venture capital, and the eventual IPO. While tensions originally ran high, eventually these perspectives converged as social media and influencer culture emerged and thrived. This, of course, gave rise over the next decade to some of the most lucrative products and platforms of all (e.g. Facebook, YouTube) - and eventually, creators became the products and monetized themselves.
This eventual convergence is where much of the blockchain space has built its foundation. The perceived success of many early decentralized protocols and products is due more to their ability to capture the attention of devotees than any technological sophistication or promise. And it is social platforms and individual influencers that allow decentralized technologies to capture attention at scale without centralized coordinating parties like governments or cable network to advocate for their use.
Many of these surface-level “successful” projects have found “product-attentional fit” - the ability to consistently delight followers with new and promising information that matches the breakneck pace at which they desire to consume it. This creates an interesting effect unique to the blockchain space - price appreciation of liquid tokens. Since speculation can move at the speed of communication, and vice versa, price dominates the conversation online - and, in true self-fulfilling fashion, the conversation is amplified by influencers and social platforms, directly impacting price. This positive new information creates yet another attentional pull, and so on.
But what happens to the builders - those less concerned with speculation or monetization and more concerned with creating new technologies and solutions? Inevitably they seek to seclude and insulate themselves from the manic speculation, creating “slow” communities on private networks, forums, or mailing lists. Some builders have the enviable ability to self-fund and choose how and where they engage in communication. Most do not.
As builders, we thus suffer in two primary ways. First, for those who cannot safely “opt out” of the fast-twitch informational economy, we create the visceral “crypto-attentional distress” I spoke of earlier. By constantly switching between creating and consuming different speeds and types of information, we live in a constant state of vertigo, destroying our ability to hold sustained attention on building what we should or must. Building slowly and deliberately is critical, especially for decentralized tech, where the stakes are high and risks are existential. But communicating quickly and broadly is critical for the attentional capture that powers the growth of decentralized networks.
Second, and more dangerously, there are those builders who seek to resolve this dissonance by secluding themselves from the public conversation. But by forgoing the opportunity to educate and advocate, we only worsen the divide between those engaging in the “slow” work of creation and others in the “fast” business of communication and speculation. By tightening our filter bubbles, it makes it harder to build products that will be used by the public. By not engaging in education, we undermine the userbase that can bring decentralized technologies into the mainstream.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a complete solution. But I believe that good solutions begin with a good formulation of the problem - and, sometimes, a clever name for it.
If you or a loved one are suffering from crypto-attentional distress, there is help. Talk with each other, or me. Join supportive communities that share your challenges and want to create solutions. Maybe the killer app in the blockchain space is the one that can resolve this distress - the same way social media resolved the tension between “web people” and “dot-com people”.
Want to talk about this? Do not hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter or reply privately to this newsletter!
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