Dan Olson / Folding Ideas

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Dan discusses the changes at Blizzcon that spawned a 5h+ long queue.

So, remember the Decentraland News Network guy? Kevinonearth? Turns out he did a reaction to the portions of Dan's video on him and it's... genuinely kinda fascinating.

TLDW he spends a lot of time basically getting really excited to hear his name, and then goes onto eventually decry Dan for FUD and not getting his "art."

So exactly what one would expect a crypto shill to do.

I'm trying to watch through it but holy fuck is it so fucking cringey.

Like him just whooping up and down as Dan introduces everything, like you literally see a Pavlovian response with him getting hype every time his name gets mentioned and it's like....dude think more of yourself man, what're you even doing.

Not helping the general vibe that hardcore crypto pushers were all grown in a vat someplace—so many of them are just kind of... like that? It's like they started existing, as fully-grown humans, right around when the first NFT was minted. No life experiences, no frame of reference, nothing before that point. A lot of their online histories would seem to reflect that too, at least whenever they weren't doing something else and suddenly pivoted.

It's unspeakably bizarre and kind of creepy. A bit sad, even.

Edited by Chortleous on Dec 31st 2023 at 6:08:20 AM

most of them are probably bots

Dan spending the last hour retweeting various Apes going on about how his video would be proven wrong to mention that it's yet to happen.

Bots are one thing, but I should add that this includes the ones with faces and names and tangible public presences who couldn't possibly be bots, like Kevin. That's what makes it so goddamn weird. Cult-y.

Edited by Chortleous on Dec 31st 2023 at 7:05:35 AM

Some people are just like that— They don't really get the idea of having interests outside of things that can make them money

Cryptobros are what happen when Techbros meet Financebros. It's the unholy fusion of

1. "Everything exists to be commodified as a financial asset. The only true value that anything ever has is what the price that I can resell it for. If you aren't buying things for the purpose of financial speculation then why would you even be doing it? The only reason we're here is to MAKE. MO-NEY."
2. "Look, man, this is the future. This technology is the future, okay. I'm building the future here. Don't you want to live in Star Trek? Well, investing in my shitty product that looks futuristic but doesn't actually do anything useful is how we get to Star Trek. Sure, it's trash now, it was trash last year, and it's been trash for five years. But ten years from now, it will blow your mind."

These two mindsets collide, merge, and then before you know it we're selling Bored Apes on Decentraland.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 31st 2023 at 8:30:26 AM

We need to stop calling them bros,they give actual,decent bros a bad name

The word I'm thinking of starts with a w..

I'd argue it essentially is a cult, at least in the same way conspiracy theorist groups like Q Anon are.

When they start calling any doubt "FUD", that's a pretty big red flag.

while we're at that can we change "dudebro" as well, for the same reasons?

More seriously, cults tend to be very good at the gifting game, so its no surprise that gritfers decided to take their playbooks wholesale from them.

can't wait to promote my new CC KoolAidKoin on Decentraland

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 1st 2024 at 8:00:36 AM

It actually wouldn't be the first time. "The Amway Tools Cult" for example was an MLM from the 70's or so that effectively became a cult distributing "Motivational Tools" to its members that was basically cult propaganda disguised as self-help advice. Essentially that had a shallow but charismatic-sounding message of "imagine a future where you're rich, then work for Amway and abolish all doubt and eventually it'll get there".

You could, theoretically, turn this into a literal cult if you so desired. The heresy of Prosperity Gospel is pretty close.

Though admittedly I have trouble imagining them embracing NF Ts, but dumber things have happened.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Jan 1st 2024 at 9:36:44 AM

I tried explaining to somebody in meatspace a while back that the kind of organization people describe as "cults" these days don't necessarily need to be religious organizations. NXIVM was widely described as a "cult" and did use many of the controlling and manipulative tactics associated with cults, and they were a secular organization.

Recognizing them as a cult just requires letting go of archaic imagery of what a cult's supposed to look like, aesthetically. Yeah, they don't gather in robes and chant in Latin, but most cults don't do that.

Cryptobros have sacred rituals the community undertakes. They use rhetoric to isolate their membership from outsiders because we're the only ones who really understand. They have romanticized legends about foundational figures and events. They purport a distorted worldview and use rhetorical tricks to discourage questioning of it. They even have an apocalypse myth.

They use rhetoric and mythmaking to control the way people think and behave for the purpose of sustaining and growing an insular community, for the benefit of their leadership who prey on their unsuspecting flock. This is absolutely a burgeoning religion.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 2nd 2024 at 8:03:42 AM

Dan himself highlighted a whole bunch of these behaviors explicitly in Line Goes Up but also grazes by them in In Search of a Flat Earth, The Future is a Dead Mall, and This Is Financial Advice.

But yeah get rid of the expected trappings one normally typifies "religions" and "cults" with and it turns out online communities warp themselves into pseudoreligions and cargo cults all the damn time. One of the funniest to me has been the online atheist movements through the 2000s and 2010s, not only because the form of atheism is so distinctly Christian in flavor (because so many of them are simply acting out against their Christian upbringings) but also because in several cases this "atheism" becomes a religion unto itself, with figureheads and beyond-abstracted concepts of "science" and "logic" and "rationality" simply taking the place of typical deities with no introspection as to how backwards that is for a supposed "atheist" to take. It's really not too dissimilar to the kind of cognitive dissonance that leads to people vibing their way through all the contradictions of Qanon or the inherent contradictions in being a crypto-bro.

Hell, it's a lot of the exact same people who keep falling for weird techbro cult after weird techbro cult and there's a huge overlap with the (effectively) atheist cult.

You can even see it in the AI stuff, with a lot of these people being thoroughly unable to understand what AI is actually capable of and doing things like scaring themselves by telling the AI to generate a scenario (with heavy prompting that they frequently forget to crop out) and then thinking the AI made up the scenario on its own.

Turns out it's pretty easy to attract people to a cult when your targets routinely gaslight themselves with no outside prompting.

Not to mention that their version of "rational" is pretty damn irrational, because it means ignoring the local rules of a situation, sometimes to really deranged levels.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 2nd 2024 at 12:36:39 PM

Yeah I threw in the Air Quotes precisely because of how inherently backwards their takes on those concepts are to the real things.

Dan called Decentraland "a child's form of governance", and it easily spools to the rest of these: online atheism is a child's form of a belief system, NFT and memestock apes are a child's form of personal finance, and the recent shilling of AI art is a child's form of an art movement. All of this shit is the machinations of children, specifically those who spend way too much time on video game forums and subreddits and are trying to warp reality itself into operating the same way. So much of the shit of the last decade has clearly had internet gamer bullshit bleeding all over it and it's part of what's made Olson so effective as a documentarian, that he knows these systems enough to call them what they are.

I've brought this up on this thread before, but a lot of the behaviors of Apes are startlingly similar to those of Qanon believers, especially circa 2019-2020 before their stuff became just regular GOP gospel. QAnon Anonymous followers probably would be familiar with these.

The main difference between these new cults (Apes, Cryptobros, Qanon) and traditional cults isn't the aesthetic, but the lack of a proper leadership culture. Traditional Cults have a hierarchy and someone on top who dissiminates and determines what's the cult's dogma. These modern internet age cults don't have that. You have more influencial members (the influencers who make videos/dd/etc...) but no one's in charge - even in Qanon, followers were all too willing to ignore stuff Q said that wasnt convenient. Instead Dogman and narrative is created communally, by having various people write their idea and see what gets wildly adopted. And similarly ideas that are central to the dogma can be discarded entirely. Dogma by popular vote

Dan mentioned on a tweet on new years eve for example that Gamestop Apes are basically just abandoning the idea of finding billions of fake shares. Despite that being, ya know, the entire core of what they were doing, its not happening, so that belief is being left by the wayside. It's now all about just how Gamestop may become profiteable again.

Going from "having literally one (real) share of Gamestop will be enough to make you world influencing levels of rich" to "we just hope that the stock does okay" is one hell of a goalpost move.

Again, not that far from other such cults

Qanons went from "Trump is in power and he's secretly about to take down the deep state and Hilary is going to jail and we're on the verge of a Utopia" to "He can probably beat Biden next election assuming he doesn't end up in jail"

And Cryptobros where 2/3rd of them just jump ship to AI and like to pretend they werent going off for literal years about how NFTs were the future and those who remain are basically "Well maybe my crypto exchange of choice isn't about to close / have its entire staff arrested for turbofraud".

Edited by Ghilz on Jan 2nd 2024 at 1:46:27 PM

I think what makes the cryptobros stick out though is that the people they latch onto as their "prophets" are almost invariably like "who the fuck are you freaks? Go away, leave me alone."

Qanon did very much the same. Either people they hyped as their heroes got weirdly put off, or went full grifter (See Michael Flynn).

The difference is that Qanon was listening to...someone who was telling them that. With the cryptobros, a lot of it seems to be genuinely organic with no real driving force beyond their own peer pressure.

It's a lot of crab bucket syndrome where there's not even a nominal driving force. Because with Qanon, there is someone giving really vague and unclear directions, but the cryptobros don't even have that.

I do think a lot of it is an obsession with trying to build a community by a bunch of people who don't seem to have any hobbies or interests beyond the most mainstream of mainstream or what can make them money. It's really hard to make a connection with someone who doesn't seem to comprehend the idea of doing something just for fun and who treats seeing a movie like homework or who will only try out a hobby if it's possible to monetize it.