Cargo Cult or Kula Ring? The Battle for Shared Ethos in Web3

Abstract

The emergence of blockchain technology spawned numerous experiments in alternative ownership and value creation. Uniting these was a singular thesis: That decentralized infrastructures could birth a new, user operated and owned Internet. This vision is what drives the otherwise inchoate collection of actors and activities called “Web3.” Web3’s infancy has been a wobbly one. Despite persistent claims to the contrary, many of its projects had echoes of practices that had emerged in different places and times – many of which were snuffed out by the relentless march of colonial capitalism. These same forces remain at play within Web3 and are most pronounced at its intersection with centralized and/or highly speculative financial services and products. There is a risk of building alternative’ digital spaces, modes of governance, and value systems, which are blind to history. In this chapter, I describe how my own blockchain alternative payment company offers an anthropology-based intervention, and how an anthropologist such as myself might guide these nascent projects away from building more technologically complex architectures of colonial capitalism, directing them instead toward alternatives which bulwark against the most pernicious harms of our time – from climate change to wealth inequality.