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Buzzwords and pop psychology₁ dominate the market of commodities. Without tiktok influencers chili's, ali-express, and NFTs would be in shambles. If you can't create good video content, any genius idea or invention that you have will be terribly hard for you to gather support around. The average intelligence is dwindling and our lifeforces are being depleted through algorithmic time-slop. AI art has shown us just how ugly the eye of the average "fan of art" has also become. The "magic" of creating through text creates the impression that creation has been done, but it's 99% all a completely terrible doomsday.
Video content has become increasingly popular over the years, and it makes sense, as society shifts towards the vortexual, hyperrealness of entertainment in the digital, the dopamine trap with optimized hooks for pattern acquisition becomes a loop constantly swallowing your perception until the only thing you see is your shadow.
We become more machine, cyborgs in tune with the statistically popular videos in the algorithmic timeline, circle full of KOLs and politics. We live in proximity of digital golems. data used to create a simulation akin to the popular stimulacrum called "Sims".
How ironic.
The problem this article will address isn't the breaching privacy, tech, or obsession with video entertainment for low level thinkers. But rather, the enframement trap of language, marketing, and sociological patterns which emerge from the etymology of it's progenitors, whom systemically bypass your defene systems as if made out of radio wave signals.
Meaning relies on an implicit social contract, and once a word's meaning has changed enough, said contract is void for most of the speakers in a community. When we study etymology we uncover how malleable words are, and how definitions shift over time.
The rational thing to ask is this, if nobody called the internet web2, why do people call crypto web3, and is this just another internet slang term that will die out eventually?

When marketing a "new idea" or invention, it's necessary to explain the product. Explaining something that previously hasn't existed is also extremely complex and really difficult. We must not only grab broadly complex subjects and connect them through loose threads of thought, but we also must be able to condense those connections into a small enough form, to reshape and mold it like clay. Creating a new idea is a lot like clay.
The term "Web3" was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, the idea spread in 2021 , 8 years later when crypto enthusiasts, tech companies, and venture capital firms decided to adopt the term in order to further market the technology.
Billionaires Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, have criticized that Web3 only serves as a buzzword or marketing term.
The term Web3 however is just a remixed mesh of the read-only, and read-write stages of the internet, the term Web3 implies that the internet's 3rd & final form is Ethereum.
But saying it so directly clocks as arrogant and generates little hype, it gathers no steam behind desiring digital revolution, digital assets, digital art, or digital currencies. Despite stablecoins gaining popularity in upcoming American politics and laws, Ethereum's long standing community is still very immature in their comprehension of the UX side, digital payments tacked on to modern-day apps, fails to meaningfully change much.
Doesn't suffice to muster up a "this is an evolutionary form of the internet".
Some never communicate this fragmented aspects of the terminology because they lack critical counter-intelligence, others never do it because their jobs depend on never questioning it publically. Marketing Leads using the term "Web3" are financially obligated to use language that persuades their audience, that their product is worth buying, or investing in, or simply being around as a community.
My balanced outcome on this is simple,
Ethereum is more like a plug-in, rather than a new internet.

On the weekends during COVID-19 people slowly began hanging out online in chatrooms like clubhouse, people could chat to famous and powerful people, it was intellectually stimulating during a period of forced isolation where the only human connection was the digital world.
Clubhouse had the power to connect you to powerful people you'd have never met if it wasn't for the internet. Shortly after, Twitter (X) saw the opportunity like all tech giants to copy this profitable feature, and it led to the proliferation of Twitter Spaces, NFTs, and digital assets, becoming extremely popular, thus a market for art was born.
But where were the most powerful ideologies coming from? They were coming from wealthy people who could afford to quickly prop up a brand, to market themselves up as experts, and to tell YOU with the most confidence how to think, view, and speak of the new tools, using ideologies that they recycled for the purpose of communicating Web3, not to help you understand computer science, but because shilling it was profitable.
I don't believe that Gavin Woods or Vitalik Buterin in 2014, maliciously used "prettified language" to mislead people. As both are very liberal leaning in their ideologies, what's more likely is that, people have repurposes this term to create marketing campaigns that invoke a sense of futurism and credibility, during a pandemic with the highest number of sign-ups to digital stock marketing apps, during social isolation where majority of the consumers were uneducated in finances, business, and tech, and by bypassing the UX of YouTube, Twitter Spaces became a place to drink from a future unlikely to exist.
The mountain of evidence against Web3 and ideologies is massive, but also because this digital money was so unregulated and laws were pre-mature at the time. Silence on the issue became profitable, blackmarket marketing deals and advertisements proliferated and spread like wildfire along with the new misnomers and other buzzwords.
The space changed it's tone from a WAGMI (We are going to make it) togetherness, to a PvP battle of Marketcaps, Tokens, KOLs. Based on cumulative data. We can deduce that Web3's mania phase of 2021 created an environment ripe in profitable manipulation and calculated obfuscation. A few examples of broadly incorrect ideologies:
NFTs are like Blue Chip stocks.
Web3 is the Future of Finance.
Diamond Hands, Never Selling.
Crypto is like the Stock Market.
Don't download anything it's unsafe.
You should give without expecting.
While Web3 is a buzzword, technology like Ethereum & other Blockchains have the technological architecture anatomically designed to be anti-capitalistic.
Open-sourced ledger for digital money, transparency, and coded rules built with smart contracts creates new windows of opportunities for creative software & technology.
Corporatized language on it's highest level is typically not generated to exploit low comprehension of technology. But in a digital environment with little regulations and high accessibility, education and language in general becomes a threat because there is no unified meaning implicitly intact, or misnomers and confusing language are added.
If we can identify the words which dive the populace into secular and technical failures, we can save our ethics and morality before they are exploited by mass ignorance.

The confident and loud players have been speaking in a borrowed language that doesn't quite correlate to our average reality.
It's a subtle shift in language that's requird to steer our ship correctly. The Holy Bible quotes this solution perfectly in James 3:4-5.
"4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. 5 Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark."
This is why we need we must start building intellectual tools, that give people agency and accurate language, this avoids incorrect ideological crabtraps stemming from the loud and confident wrongfulness. When we understand things aren't as they seem, and actively push back with critical thought, we have the power to reshape the world.
Despite Ethereum's perplexing mess of language, the technology's design to serve transparent data and Smart Contracts are potent solutions to archiac ways of digital collaboration and governance. Hope permeates through the tool of Ethereum, only by the humans, so while it is a human problem of comprehension, it will likely get better.

At least I hope so.
Let’s keep the conversation going.
📩 Email us: research@mentalwealthacademy.net
📢 Subscribe, comment, like — your feedback shapes what we build.
🐦 Follow us on X: @MentalWealthDAO
Buzzwords and pop psychology₁ dominate the market of commodities. Without tiktok influencers chili's, ali-express, and NFTs would be in shambles. If you can't create good video content, any genius idea or invention that you have will be terribly hard for you to gather support around. The average intelligence is dwindling and our lifeforces are being depleted through algorithmic time-slop. AI art has shown us just how ugly the eye of the average "fan of art" has also become. The "magic" of creating through text creates the impression that creation has been done, but it's 99% all a completely terrible doomsday.
Video content has become increasingly popular over the years, and it makes sense, as society shifts towards the vortexual, hyperrealness of entertainment in the digital, the dopamine trap with optimized hooks for pattern acquisition becomes a loop constantly swallowing your perception until the only thing you see is your shadow.
We become more machine, cyborgs in tune with the statistically popular videos in the algorithmic timeline, circle full of KOLs and politics. We live in proximity of digital golems. data used to create a simulation akin to the popular stimulacrum called "Sims".
How ironic.
The problem this article will address isn't the breaching privacy, tech, or obsession with video entertainment for low level thinkers. But rather, the enframement trap of language, marketing, and sociological patterns which emerge from the etymology of it's progenitors, whom systemically bypass your defene systems as if made out of radio wave signals.
Meaning relies on an implicit social contract, and once a word's meaning has changed enough, said contract is void for most of the speakers in a community. When we study etymology we uncover how malleable words are, and how definitions shift over time.
The rational thing to ask is this, if nobody called the internet web2, why do people call crypto web3, and is this just another internet slang term that will die out eventually?

When marketing a "new idea" or invention, it's necessary to explain the product. Explaining something that previously hasn't existed is also extremely complex and really difficult. We must not only grab broadly complex subjects and connect them through loose threads of thought, but we also must be able to condense those connections into a small enough form, to reshape and mold it like clay. Creating a new idea is a lot like clay.
The term "Web3" was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, the idea spread in 2021 , 8 years later when crypto enthusiasts, tech companies, and venture capital firms decided to adopt the term in order to further market the technology.
Billionaires Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, have criticized that Web3 only serves as a buzzword or marketing term.
The term Web3 however is just a remixed mesh of the read-only, and read-write stages of the internet, the term Web3 implies that the internet's 3rd & final form is Ethereum.
But saying it so directly clocks as arrogant and generates little hype, it gathers no steam behind desiring digital revolution, digital assets, digital art, or digital currencies. Despite stablecoins gaining popularity in upcoming American politics and laws, Ethereum's long standing community is still very immature in their comprehension of the UX side, digital payments tacked on to modern-day apps, fails to meaningfully change much.
Doesn't suffice to muster up a "this is an evolutionary form of the internet".
Some never communicate this fragmented aspects of the terminology because they lack critical counter-intelligence, others never do it because their jobs depend on never questioning it publically. Marketing Leads using the term "Web3" are financially obligated to use language that persuades their audience, that their product is worth buying, or investing in, or simply being around as a community.
My balanced outcome on this is simple,
Ethereum is more like a plug-in, rather than a new internet.

On the weekends during COVID-19 people slowly began hanging out online in chatrooms like clubhouse, people could chat to famous and powerful people, it was intellectually stimulating during a period of forced isolation where the only human connection was the digital world.
Clubhouse had the power to connect you to powerful people you'd have never met if it wasn't for the internet. Shortly after, Twitter (X) saw the opportunity like all tech giants to copy this profitable feature, and it led to the proliferation of Twitter Spaces, NFTs, and digital assets, becoming extremely popular, thus a market for art was born.
But where were the most powerful ideologies coming from? They were coming from wealthy people who could afford to quickly prop up a brand, to market themselves up as experts, and to tell YOU with the most confidence how to think, view, and speak of the new tools, using ideologies that they recycled for the purpose of communicating Web3, not to help you understand computer science, but because shilling it was profitable.
I don't believe that Gavin Woods or Vitalik Buterin in 2014, maliciously used "prettified language" to mislead people. As both are very liberal leaning in their ideologies, what's more likely is that, people have repurposes this term to create marketing campaigns that invoke a sense of futurism and credibility, during a pandemic with the highest number of sign-ups to digital stock marketing apps, during social isolation where majority of the consumers were uneducated in finances, business, and tech, and by bypassing the UX of YouTube, Twitter Spaces became a place to drink from a future unlikely to exist.
The mountain of evidence against Web3 and ideologies is massive, but also because this digital money was so unregulated and laws were pre-mature at the time. Silence on the issue became profitable, blackmarket marketing deals and advertisements proliferated and spread like wildfire along with the new misnomers and other buzzwords.
The space changed it's tone from a WAGMI (We are going to make it) togetherness, to a PvP battle of Marketcaps, Tokens, KOLs. Based on cumulative data. We can deduce that Web3's mania phase of 2021 created an environment ripe in profitable manipulation and calculated obfuscation. A few examples of broadly incorrect ideologies:
NFTs are like Blue Chip stocks.
Web3 is the Future of Finance.
Diamond Hands, Never Selling.
Crypto is like the Stock Market.
Don't download anything it's unsafe.
You should give without expecting.
While Web3 is a buzzword, technology like Ethereum & other Blockchains have the technological architecture anatomically designed to be anti-capitalistic.
Open-sourced ledger for digital money, transparency, and coded rules built with smart contracts creates new windows of opportunities for creative software & technology.
Corporatized language on it's highest level is typically not generated to exploit low comprehension of technology. But in a digital environment with little regulations and high accessibility, education and language in general becomes a threat because there is no unified meaning implicitly intact, or misnomers and confusing language are added.
If we can identify the words which dive the populace into secular and technical failures, we can save our ethics and morality before they are exploited by mass ignorance.

The confident and loud players have been speaking in a borrowed language that doesn't quite correlate to our average reality.
It's a subtle shift in language that's requird to steer our ship correctly. The Holy Bible quotes this solution perfectly in James 3:4-5.
"4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. 5 Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark."
This is why we need we must start building intellectual tools, that give people agency and accurate language, this avoids incorrect ideological crabtraps stemming from the loud and confident wrongfulness. When we understand things aren't as they seem, and actively push back with critical thought, we have the power to reshape the world.
Despite Ethereum's perplexing mess of language, the technology's design to serve transparent data and Smart Contracts are potent solutions to archiac ways of digital collaboration and governance. Hope permeates through the tool of Ethereum, only by the humans, so while it is a human problem of comprehension, it will likely get better.

At least I hope so.
Let’s keep the conversation going.
📩 Email us: research@mentalwealthacademy.net
📢 Subscribe, comment, like — your feedback shapes what we build.
🐦 Follow us on X: @MentalWealthDAO
32 comments
Willing to take the short term hit here. This is the least inspired meta we've seen yet. In part, because it's v2 (or 3, or 4) of a narrative we've seen before. Moreso because it reeks of desperation. Memecoins look like diamonds in comparison; at least there was an attempt at storytelling there. Alas, the agent meta is one devoid of agency. The robots will save us. Queue claw[every single product, but for agents!]. That we're speedrunning and the corpos are max extracting should trigger every red flag in your cryptopedia. Checkered flag, ai is fking awesome. I talk about it all the time so I won't defend its merits here. And yes, crypto tech is a perfect match. Yes, there will be awesome agents. The thing that's missing is the same as always: creativity. The big guns working on this are building infra. Makes sense, but that level of craft is required on execution, including narrative. Frankly, the tech isn't accessible enough for those who will make it truly interesting at scale. It's not secure enough. I truly hope there are some outliers, otherwise they'll be a dearth of inspiration once this pops. I hope some of you make bags, and I hope less of you lose them. We're a ways away from the version of this that is meaningful. Rather than consuming the narrative, my advice is to actually try this stuff out. Get in the terminal. Make something for yourself. Make something for others. Find the magic and harness it. Epilogue: this meta is, like the rest, a mirror. When I look at X and I look at moltbook, I see the same exact thing. What do you see, really?
Fr though excited to configure my raspberry pi and break something. Back at @enjoytech.eth we spent a good bit of time on an agent; experiencing the advances firsthand and having more experience I'm thinking I can cook something...well something up
It’s agents all the way down.
Bah upset I didn't think to say that 😂
Hey @nicolausI noticed your posts about crypto investing — I just started a channel for investors to share tips and insights. Would love to have you join: /CryptoInvestorsHub”
I'm actually working on an awesome new game project that uses agents to generate the game world and power NPCs. The emergent game play potential for AI agents is ginormous and honestly one of the most useful applications of the tech I can think of. Shame it's not being utilized more outside of slop, but thems the trenches for ya.
I keep seeing all this game tech to generate visual assets, but haven't seen much in the way of characters yet. Surprising! Please share if/when you can, it would be sweet to learn about the bts
Agreed. Same story, new label. Until people stop chasing the meta and start making cool things, it’s just hype on repeat.
The self sabo is beautiful gorgeous
I try to capture this in Nobody Called The Internet Web2, I think it still needs some work but the "loud confident" that's incorrect is what holds us back from proliferating the real. I've pretty much ignored the latest crab stuff bc its just recycled local LLM, and marketing videos saying "I text or message claude" but it implies iMessage, not a telegram bot. The confident and loud players have been speaking in a borrowed language that doesn't quite correlate to our average reality. It's a subtle shift but this bible quote James 3:4-5 puts it perfectly. "4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. 5 Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark." https://mentalwealthacademy.net/nobody-called-the-internet-web2-1
Oh hell yeah, great title. Will report back after reading with breakfast!
My portfolio’s green, feels good man
How I would do creator coins We've seen about 10 years of people trying to do content incentivization in crypto, from early-stage platforms like Bihu and Steemit, to BitClout in 2021, to Zora, to tipping features inside of decentralized social, and more. So far, I think we have not been very successful, and I think this is because the problem is fundamentally hard. First, my view of what the problem is. A major difference between doing "creator incentives" in the 00s vs doing them today, is that in the 00s, a primary problem was having not enough content at all. In the 20s, there's plenty of content, AI can generate an entire metaverse full of it for like $10. The problem is quality. And so your goal is not *incentivizing content*, it's *surfacing good content*. Personally, I think that the most successful example of creator incentives we've seen is Substack. To see why, take a look at the top 10: https://substack.com/leaderboard/technology/paid https://substack.com/leaderboard/culture/paid https://substack.com/leaderboard/world-politics/paid Now, you may disagree with many of these authors. But I have no doubt that: 1. They are on the whole high quality, and contribute positively to the discussion 2. They are mostly people who would not have been elevated without Substack's presence So Substack is genuinely surfacing high quality and pluralism. Now, we can compare to creator coin projects. I don't want to pick on a single one, because I think there's a failure mode of the entire category. For example: Top Zora creator coins: https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/zora-creator-coins BitClout: https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/inside-the-rise-of-bitclout-a-crypto-based-social-network-influencers-andreessen-horowitz-sequoia/#:~:text=Most%20of%20the,about%20BitClout%E2%80%99s%20users Basically, the top 10 are people who already have very high social status, and who are often impressive but primarily for reasons other than the content they create. At the core, Substack is a simple subscription service: you pay $N per month, and you get to see the person's articles. But a big part of Substack's success is that they did not just set the mechanism and forget. Their launch process was very hands-on, deliberately seeding the platform with high-quality creators, based on a very particular vision of what kind of high-quality intellectual environment they wanted to foster, including giving selected people revenue guarantees. So now, let's get to one idea that I think could work (of course, coming up with new ideas is inherently a more speculative project than criticizing existing ones, and more prone to error). Create a DAO, that is *not* token-based. Instead, the inspiration should be Protocol Guild: there are N members, and they can (anonymously) vote new members in and out. If N gets above ~200, consider auto-splitting it. Importantly, do _not_ try to make the DAO universal or even industry-wide. Instead, embrace the opinionatedness. Be okay with having a dominant type of content (long-form writing, music, short-form video, long-form video, fiction, educational...), and be okay with having a dominant style (eg. country or region of origin, political viewpoint, if within crypto which projects you're most friendly to...). Hand-pick the initial membership set, in order to maximize its alignment with the desired style. The goal is to have a group that is larger than one creator and can accumulate a public brand and collectively bargain to seek revenue opportunities, but at the same time small enough that internal governance is tractable. Now, here is where the tokens come in. In general, one of my hypotheses this decade is that a large portion of effective governance mechanisms will all have the form factor of "large number of people and bots participating in a prediction market, with the output oracle being a diverse set of people optimized for mission alignment and capture resistance". In this case, what we do is: anyone can become a creator and create a creator coin, and then, if they get admitted to a creator DAO, a portion of their proceeds from the DAO are used to burn their creator coins. This way, the token speculators are NOT participating in a recursive-speculation attention game backed only by itself. Instead, they are specifically being predictors of what new creators the high-value creator DAOs will be willing to accept. At the same time, they also provide a valuable service to the creator DAOs: they are helping surface promising creators for the DAOs to choose from. So the ultimate decider of who rises and falls is not speculators, but high-value content creators (we make the assumption that good creators are also good judges of quality, which seems often true). Individual speculators can stay in the game and thrive to the extent that they do a good job of predicting the creator DAOs' actions.
You are over enginneering an incentive problem. Creator coins didn’t “fail.” They worked exactly as designed. infinite token issuance turns attention into a casino. The more tokens you can mint, the more incentive you have to mint more, pump them, and dump them. No amount of DAOs, burns, or prediction markets fixes this
If you're saying that the ultimate problem is that these mechanisms were designed not by people who understand and value good content, but by people who understand and value the casino, then yeah, I agree. My proposed solution is that we need to get people who understand and value content to try to do these things.
You can fix that by having AI with a good persona and intent being in charge no?
But that will always be overshadowed by the economic incentives. Fix the nothing at stake problem of launching ad Infinitium coins first
P2P doesn’t need creator coins, it’s unreasonable to stack more procces with a function like p2p Now it’s about content curation and mechanism for content curation
> My proposed solution is that we need to get people who understand and value content to try to do these things. At Kiwi News we understand and value good content. I'd be open to build a feature that tests a hypothesis you want to be validated. What would you like us to try?
I feel a lot of this transpires simply bc proliferation depended on marketing. Pandemic-ERA million dollar monkey jpegs was so silly, but the charlatans hosting X-Twitter Spaces were those raised through r/WallstreetBets and Marketing backgrounds. It makes complete sense that their use of language would end up dominating the global groupthink, tainting the path and everything around in red. As i wrote in “Nobody Called The Internet Web2” I don’t feel that you or gavin created Web3 as a buzzword, but that’s what it’s become. I’m not a great writer yet but I’ve been terminally online since chat rooms, and believe we take power back not through a Web3 Instagram or Web3 Substack. Zora and Paragraph do nothing but proliferate incentives over quality. Our only hope is curation but without the groupthink power that’s easier to those who aren’t like us, it’s extremely hard. https://mentalwealthacademy.net/nobody-called-the-internet-web2-1
you gotta stop thinking of it as a "casino"
in the casino you dont do any research vitalik , here everyone have to option to dyor , so stop fudding crypto for once
A few questions (in good faith): - collective bargaining to who and for what? - why would someone like Mr. Beast, or other top 10 creators, do something like this to accrue value for the whole, when they can accrue all the value themselves? - is the DAO mechanism really necessary? What about creator houses all under one manager?
These are my questions too
God, I remember BitClout :<
One thing that feels under-discussed with creator coins is the psychological shift they force onto creators. The moment you issue a coin, you’re no longer just creating, you’re suddenly a financier, token economist, IR department, and market maker. Attention moves from the work itself to holders, price, supply, narratives, and expectations. Something subtle but real breaks there. And a creator coin is singular: once it’s launched, that’s it. You can’t “re-launch” yourself. So what happens if a creator has a massive payday early on? If they want to create again later, the only option is… another coin. Different platform, same audience, and suddenly fans feel confused or betrayed and start throwing around words like “cash grab.” That’s why NFTs always made more sense to me. They map much more cleanly to how creators actually work: many creations over time, each standing on its own, without permanently turning the creator into a walking balance sheet. Creator coins don’t just incentivize content they quietly turn creators into markets, and that mental shift is the hardest part to undo.
quality is curated @kiwi https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/vitalik.eth:-How-I-would-do-creator-coins?index=0x697f59aae4ef067930c4154b0f4545d64ba6908bef025c186d141251dc5fabc93ac12aff
How do you ensure that a creator will not bypass collective bargaining, when they don't need it? I'm an unknown and undervalued creator, I join a creators DAO and get the benefits from collective bargaining. Then I get an offer to sell my work directly to a buyer. Why would I sell through the DAO and get 1/200 of the value?
@sopha-curator
The current unsustainability comes from the fact that many of the latest crypto creator platforms drifted into the memecoin cycle. They optimized for ephemeral attention while ignoring the need for teams and communities that curate, support, and nurture creators and artists. But culture is always built bottom-up. Because of that, I don’t think Ethereum can continue being fertile ground for active cultural creators if we keep over-engineering the financial infrastructure while neglecting the social one. We keep treating this as a market problem when it’s actually a social and cultural issue. And if we’re building creative platforms that involves social networks, then the social sciences and the arts aren’t optional — they’re foundational.
Hypersub is a good model I think. I was rooting for that one to take off but I feel it kind of fizzled.
This actually makes a lot of sense. Framing tokens as signals to surface quality, not as the incentive itself, feels like the missing piece and the Substack comparison lands. Really thoughtful take.