The Human Element 📙
Selections | Laura Shin’s “The Cryptopians”
Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.
The challenge of writing detailed journalistic “history-as-it-happens” so soon after the events documented is that the emotions of the culture you write from and for have not yet cooled. No matter who you praise and who you pillory, somebody is going to be furious. You’ll neglect someone’s patron saint and praise somebody’s pet villain. You’ll challenge the accepted truths of popular culture. Far easier, and perhaps even far more historically correct, to wait a generation or two until the facts are all (mostly) laid out in neat incontrovertible rows. But Laura Shin hasn’t chosen to wait, and I am very glad for that. Instead of a historically distanced work of surgical precision, she’s given the world a snarled up ball of intrigue and rival egos and conflict, the early history of Ethereum. You should read it, and not just because it’s a fascinating story filled with quality journalism. You should read it because The Cryptopians reminds us of a vital truth about technologies both new and old.
One of the central questions of science fiction literature and cinema is “what is humanity?” Our cultural touchstones keep on picking at the scab, wondering out loud if we can really understand ourselves yet. And since science fiction focuses on the future, one of the main ways it attacks the question is to ask, “does technology change what it means to be human?” Since we live in an age of wonders, are we obsolete? Are our actions so constrained as to lose all meaning, or do we still have some role to play amongst the silicon and glass? Like all good history, The Cryptopians reminds us that much remains unchanged even in our age. Technology, as always, is human.
This is a vital reminder, especially at the dawn of the web3 revolution. In many ways, the stories told around these technologies praises their independence, their human-proofing and decentralization. This is often a very real benefit, and one of the innovations which has allowed such quick adoption and rapid iteration of these technologies is their (mostly) permissionless nature. But we can’t get so caught up in the marketing headlines that we forget the human origin and failure points of all technologies, from the stone ax down to the present. The story of Ethereum is a totally human story. The deeply intelligent but socially awkward and naïve founder doesn’t realize when he’s being manipulated and taken advantage of until it’s almost too late. The growing court of builders and operators and hangers-on and court jesters forms and grows, some revealing themselves to be sharks circling a hemorrhaging pile of investment cash. And an incredibly exciting and valuable new technology grows at the speed of human minds and compromises, always a mere forgotten passphrase or hard drive failure or unpatched vulnerability away from extinction.
Just nine years ago, Ethereum was only a dream in the mind of a 19-year-old Russian-Canadian college student who slept on his friends’ futons and solved puzzles on long walks.
~ Andrew Chow, for Time Magazine
Reading books like this that reveal the mostly unseen side of any industry can feel a bit disorienting, as what seemed solid is revealed to be anything but trustworthy. When a cultural lightning rod like cryptocurrency is involved, the reactions are predictably heated. You can almost hear the tut-tutting of the tradfi crew. “Exactly as we said, it’s nothing but vaporware cooked up by motivated stoners trying to live out their tawdry wealth fantasies. It’s buggy, exploitable and internally corrupt. Best stick to real money!” And they have a point, as far as it goes. Which is exactly until you read The Big Short, or Black Edge, or Flash Boys. And then you realize that every criticism leveled at the next generation of financial technologies is equally if not more applicable to the last. What’s the common factor? Humans. We are greedy, we underestimate risks, we carefully break every system to our own advantage. And we are the creators of every nanometer of silicon and every keystroke of code. And also every bank, equities derivative, and hoary governmental institution. None of it sprang from the ground, it was all build by human minds and is currently managed by them.
We’ve discussed before the dangers of attributing human error (and human greatness) to the magical powers of the machine. And the web3 space is no different. DAOs are a fascinating governance structure that allows for flexibility and participation in new and exciting ways. But without care and human discipline, they can become a buzzword concealing essentially a clannish and opaque investment club that talks on a chat app. The philosophical governance questions wrestled over by the early Ethereum founders reveal the real problems inherent in any new organizational structure, regardless of whether the technology associated with it is web3 enabled or webs of human reputation in a stone-age encampment. Where are the incentives, who holds the off switch, and who writes the checks are vital questions. Especially when disaster strikes, when hacks drain funds and protocols break down and bitter rivalries split teams, human responsibility is the awkward truth we would rather dodge. We feel more comfortable in a realm of 0 and 1 because the implacable face of the monitor will silently receive the blame for our own oversights and hubris. And if our utopias don’t come to pass, we’ll just reframe it as an iteration and add a new stop on the end of the roadmap.
Any normal person who’s not a crypto person would look at that and say, ‘That’s a theft’…But in crypto, they were so wrapped in the code that it became this philosophical question for them. They don’t want human intervention: They want the blockchains to just be these autonomous things.
~ Laura Shin, interviewed for Time Magazine
This all sounds a bit cynical, which is not our stock-in-trade here. How are we supposed to be excited about the future when our technological innovations don’t protect us from theft, pride and jealousy? An overly simplistic answer is that we have the responsibility for our own decisions. This is both a heavy weight and an incredible freedom. Throughout The Cryptopians, the theme of responsibility gives the narrative gravity, as a collection of loveable and less than loveable software engineers and cypherpunks gradually realize that the world is putting billions of dollars on the line and in their hands. This weight lies heavy, but it is not brand new to our generation. Every technological leap forward reminds us that our actions have incredible potential, and incredible danger. Markets, networks, institutions and protocols masquerade as people but in reality are collections of people, and that is a major difference.
After all, if web3 really is the printing press of our generation, then we should expect its power to strike out in all directions. Luther printed vernacular translations of the Bible and then at the end of his life printed anti-Semitic screeds. Out of the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. But the choice is always ours. The Cryptopians vividly illustrates that the next generation of technology has dispensed with many gatekeepers, handing each of us a deadly weapon with filled chambers and letting us decide whether to blow our brains out or find and neutralize some great predator threatening our society. And in some way, we owe to God a reckoning for the power our generation is given. And not just for the power that we abused, for the evil that we did, but for the potential good that we failed to do.
Years after the events of the book, Ethereum seems as strong as ever, a protocol which has spawned a massive software ecosystem and seems to be growing in importance and stability by the hour. But the lessons of The Cryptopians remain in effect. Never forget the human brains, the collections of faults and intentions and pride, that lie behind every seemingly eternal tool and institution we interact with daily. Wisdom would demand we survey ourselves and our holdings carefully, asking if we are making the best use of our resources and putting our technological leverage to good use. After all, you have access to every tool of computing and networking (and more) that Vitalik Buterin and associates used to launch a software money technology, and far more power than most of history’s great builders and artists have had at their disposal. There’s fewer people who can stand in your way every day, and more allies by the minute who are ready to join forces with. What are you working on?
Excellent essay.