Is web3 a new means of production that can help humans achieve a post-capitalist world that saves us all?

I arrived in Paris to the smells of croissants, cigarettes, and petrichor. The rain had thankfully arrived to cool the city from some of the hottest temperatures it had ever seen, with a heat dome smothering the French capital and wildfires burning in the Gironde region to the southwest. 

As the mercury hit 107 degrees F (42 degrees C), hundreds of people flocked to Paris to attend the fifth annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC). The non-profit Ethereum France organizes the event, labeling it “the largest annual European Ethereum event focused on technology and community.”

I had come not to see the conference itself, but to witness the culture that the technology and community has created. Dozens of side events and parties round out the convention, with fledgling web3 startups and established crypto companies shelling out cash for the opportunity gather a largely digital culture in the real world – or perhaps to shill new products under the guise of good will (or a bit of both). 

Though Ether was up 40 percent at the time of this writing, the specter of a bear market still looms, and stigma continues to be an inhibitor for greater web3 onboarding. So rather than listen to carefully composed lectures and presentations, I opted to be in the places where the culture could shed light on a more authentic perspective of this moment – and to see how the crypto ecosystem might cool its own self-inflicted scorched earth.

In 1871, thousands of Parisian workers “stormed heaven” and took the government, in the words of Karl Marx. It was “the dawn of the great social revolution which will liberate mankind from the regime of classes forever,” he said. The proletariat maintained control for 72 days before the ruling class wrested back power, killing upwards of 20,000 rebels and arresting another 45,000 to restore a class-based system led by the bourgeoisie. 

Marx would likely approve of web3’s more idealistic actors, whose goals echo some of the egalitarian aims of the German philosopher. He predicted that capitalism created internal tensions similar to previous socioeconomic systems and those would ultimately lead to its demise. The recent rise of oligarchs and technocrats epitomize the radical wealth disparity in today’s hyper-capitalist world. The fact that we’re having to choose between saving people and saving the planet exemplifies the system’s failure at value alignment. Web3’s calls to reimagine incentives and prioritize decentralization are societal ripostes not vastly different from the proletariat dissent of the past.

“We’re just trying to focus on the human side because that’s what we’re going to need to succeed. But it’s hard to do with all of the stigma surrounding crypto.”

— Robbie Paterson

By pure happenstance, my Airbnb was just two blocks from where Marx met Friedrich Engels some 27 years before the briefly held Paris Commune of 1871. After checking in, I passed the meeting spot en route to joining some people at Le Kiosque Flottant, a docked boat and events venue on the Seine. About 30 people mingled at a party sponsored by Chainflip, a platform for cross-chain swaps that will support interoperability between different blockchains. 

I grabbed a Leffe from the open bar and was introduced to Robbie Paterson, who leads comms and strategy for the company. "We're just trying to focus on the human side because that's what we're going to need to succeed” – the company is still in very early stages – “but it's hard to do with all of the stigma surrounding crypto," he said.

In the middle of the deck, DJs played various subgenres of electronic music in Boiler Room-esque fashion – i.e. a camera livestreamed the DJs alongside the dancing crowds. From time to time Chainflip’s CEO, Simon Harman, took the mic and pulled people from the party to ask them questions about crypto.

He asked James Beck – head of communications at Consensys, the prominent software company behind Ethereum blockchain products like Metamask and Infura – about the long-awaited “Merge,” Ethereum’s protracted transition from proof-of-work to the drastically less energy intensive proof-of-stake protocol. The forthcoming development has been the primary salve for naysayers who criticize the technology as pointless environmental strain.

The Merge info page via ConsenSys

Beck referenced Tim Beiko’s cheese analogy. “What we do know is that the Goeril testnet merge is going to happen August 11, and that’s about as firm as a hard-aged cheddar. The other thing they announced last week that got people really excited – and could be the reason ether has gone up in price – is that the actual merge is proposed to happen on September 19. That [date] is about as firm as a soft cheese.” 

Beck was one of the DJs spinning at the party. Leading up to the conference, he’d responded to Chainflip’s solicitation for “web3 DJs” to play the event. This was Beck’s fourth year attending EthCC.

“The first one I went to was EthCC 2,” he told me. “What felt different about it was they specifically didn’t want companies to come shill their services or products, so they didn’t even really set up booths.

“And it was the only conference I went to where people presented things that had no direct web3 application – like applied mathematics, homomorphic encryption, or zero knowledge proofs – things that now exist in Ethereum. They were just there to present research, so it was naturally more of a community conference.”

He got on the decks soon after we spoke. I watched him play artists like Pearson Sound and Lisene from the boat’s bow, where I was sitting next to Jodi Callender, operations workstream lead at Gitcoin and Beck’s partner. 

Crypto’s continued lack of diversity

“It’s wild that there are only five women here,” she observed. Callender was also the only black person on the boat. People chatted along the boat’s margins, bobbing their heads. Laptops sat parked on some tables. The team handed out Chainflip tees. Boats felt like EthCC’s less assuming version of booths.

Later that night I got dinner with a smattering of crypto folks and plus-ones. We had traditional Breton food at La Pointe du grouin, a brick-laden restaurant named after a rocky peninsula off the northern coast of Brittany. Coincidentally, to purchase anything, we had to exchange money for the eatery’s native Groin token – an actual physical token, wholly unaffiliated with cryptocurrency. The currency was pegged to the euro and used to purchase everything in the restaurant. As people joined our crew, the allusions to that twist of crypto fate was revisited anew. Making our way through a magnum from the restaurant’s expansive wine cave, conversation skittered about the table as we bounced between Polygon’s new zero knowledge proof technology, Mexican food, the end of the world and the rest of the evening.

The night carried us to Badaboum, a club in the Bastille neighborhood where Radicle and crypto organizations Nomad, Ceramic, Dora, Squid, and Wonderverse were hosting resist, "a night of dark disco and bouncy house.” We walked in at 1 a.m. to the percussive techno of Roi Perez, a Berlin-based DJ and Berghain resident. The place was packed with a largely white crowd. The bar was lined with Budweiser-branded taps.

We wandered into the club's airport-like smoking area that we waggishly dubbed the "cancer room" and then immediately left. Outdoors, the club had begun to spill on to the streets, where the revelrous smoked cigarettes in the open air and the too revelrous found themselves hunched over in street-level doorways of unsuspecting residents. Depleted of revelry, I made my way home.

Not one of the Marx brothers

Once again I passed the famed Marx/Engle meeting spot, which was also where the lifetime collaborators first discussed historical materialism, Marx’s theory that the first historical act was the production of means to provide for humans’ material needs. 

Throughout time, he said, changes in modes of production – as well as the ways in which we distribute surplus from that production – help explain political upheavals and our evolution through various economic systems. As a whole, it’s meant to challenge the notion that capitalism is the final form of our economic history – a familiar aspiration for the post-capitalist principles that buttress the web3 philosophy. 

Our potential to use the technology to redistribute wealth and challenge the capitalist paradigm may be within reach. But like any tool, it’s there to be used by anyone who has the means – equitability is an easy narrative to market, whether or not the intentions are magnanimous. Ideas to dream on.

After a short night’s sleep, a savory crepe, and three shots of espresso, I went off in search of my inner Hemingway, spending the afternoon at a Web3 Writers Salon hosted by Violet Verse -- a "content marketplace and lifestyle token-gated platform for creators and by creators." 

Melissa Henderson, founder of Violet Verse, greeted me at the door and walked me into an open, well-lit apartment in Paris's 11th arrondissement. Wine glasses and sushi plates adorned the tables. The 20-some attendees milled about, frequenting the espresso machine on the counter.

After a half hour of chatter we gathered around some couches and Henderson shared the story behind her community. The Miami-based writer has been a journalist for 10 years, with a focus on tech for the last six. She shared the pains of churning out an astounding 10-plus pieces per day for places like Huffington Post – where she was a front page managing editor – and other web2 platforms that’re incentivized to produce egregious amounts of content to trigger search algorithms and increase ad revenue. 

Melissa Henderson speaking with people about Violet Verse
photo: Van Wilhoite

She said she also lost all access to her work at Examiner when the site came down, as well as the audience that she’d built through the platform. There’s a lot of potential in creating a blockchain-powered space where content can never be deleted from the internet, like the one she’s building. In spaces like Violet Verse, value can be better tracked and distributed among the writers. It’s an example of equitability that redistributes the outsized wealth from the top to the creators – it disrupts the one-time, one-size-fits-all payout model that doesn’t value exceptional writing any differently than a run-of-the-mill shitpost that gets 10,000 likes. 

Henderson, who paid for the whole event herself, invited the people in attendance to introduce themselves, share their projects, and even read excerpts of their past writing. The group talked about valuing an outlet for creativity and vulnerability that has web3 principles, like resource information sharing and increased collaboration.

“Honestly I would love to take down everyone’s contacts and start a Telegram group,” one attendee said. “I go to all the conferences and I’ve never found a group like this.” 

Neither had I. It was the first event I’d been to an event where I felt like I wasn’t being sold anything at all. It was also one of the more diverse web3 spaces I’ve shared. “You don’t need a huge corporation to take the leap, you can do it on your own,” Henderson said. Her budding project is a paragon of the web3 vision. 

Inspired but exhausted, I disappeared to a café around the corner to have more coffee before heading to a gallery hosted by EBB, a cultural production outlet dedicated to “connecting URL and IRL.”

I got a “cocktail NFT” that I redeemed for an actual cocktail called the “Marx-a-rita,” a take on the margarita that pays homage to Marx and Engels, “the creators of a socioeconomic analysis that hoped to change social and class relations,” as it said on the wall by the bar.

One of the pieces on display was a “death clock,” a “serial NFT project and a reminder that time is not on your side.” People could scan the QR codes on their tickets to discover how much time they had left on earth and record on-chain the date and time of their impending deaths. I chose to remain unenlightened.

The death clock photo: MacEagon Voyce

I left EBB to meet some friends to catch the sunset at Sacré-Cœur, a basilica at the base of Paris’s iconic Montmartre hill. Our group found our way to a restaurant in Le Marais, where I had ratatouille and drank my fair share of absinthe and cognac before ending up in a speakeasy in the back of a taco shop. 

Chasing the night, I wandered in the direction of the official EthCC afterparty at a club on the banks of the Seine called Wanderlust. I ended up joining a contingent of crypto party hoppers leaving the conference, following them to an adjacent club in the same complex. Jeudi OK played host to a queer electro party where dozens writhed and heaved in a sweaty mass of dance. It felt good to leave the mind and enter the body, where the intellect was relieved of heady web3 conversation, networking speak, and existential crisis. For a moment, everything was fine. Ignorance is bliss.

The sun was rising as I walked back home along the Seine. I crossed at Pont Neuf and walked through the Jardin du Carrousel where an enormous advertisement for Airpods hung from one of the walls. People always find a way to shill.

I walked past the Louvre and thought of the dead luminaries kept alive by its hallowed halls. I imagined what the legacy of web3 might be in 10, 50, 100 years. I thought of death clocks. Is web3 a new means of production that can help humans achieve a post-capitalist world that saves us all? Can we transcend nation-state gridlock and realign incentives so that our own happiness is married to the earth’s? 

At its best, web3 offers hope. Elsewhere, it’s a marketing campaign that’s simply another distraction from the fact that we’re living on a burning planet. Absinthe and Airpods and Airdrops – escape routes from the apocalypse. 

C’est la vie, the death clock marches on.