Crypto is not internet culture
Stop making me read about it!!
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, by Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.
If you read this and it makes you mad, please know nothing I say matters unless you decide it matters. Like crypto! —Kate
A few years ago, outside a bar in Williamsburg, I did the unthinkable: I asked a man to explain cryptocurrency to me.
I spent most of crypto’s slow creep into mainstream culture with my fingers stuffed in my ears, hoping that if I didn’t acknowledge it, it would go away. My friend’s explanation made sense, but I didn’t like the idea. We’ve invented digital money, and now that “money” can make someone rich or poor, simply because enough of us have agreed that it means something? (That’s also the case with real money, you say? Shut up!)
Luckily, I thought, I am not in finance or business, so crypto is well outside the realm of things I ever need to care about. So you can imagine my annoyance that, as an internet culture writer, crypto continues to be presented to me in articles, newsletters, and casual conversations as if it’s relevant to me and my interests. Let me be clear—as an internet culture writer, these are my interests.
Vlogs of 20-something women in Scandinavia doing regular things.
Doja Cat getting stuck with the Twitter display name “christmas,” convincing Elon Musk to let her change it, changing it to “Elon Musk,” and then changing it again to “fart.”
How any time someone makes a TikTok about England, inevitably someone stitches it with a picture of a fucked-up looking deep-sea fish, presumably as a commentary on the British dental system.
The fact that I can’t remember the name of the first-ever Tumblr I made, which means it’s still out there with 16-year-old me’s innermost thoughts and feelings laid bare for anyone to read, but I’ll never be able to find it.
How CupOfJo still manages to have such a thriving comment section and why she never responds to my emails asking for an interview.
“Crypto is not internet culture” is an argument that I know can easily be knocked down from a variety of angles, but I’m putting on my horse blinders and powering through. Crypto is not internet culture, it is finance culture. It belongs under the “business” section of a website. When I go to read about the things that are securely under the umbrella of internet culture, I shouldn’t have to routinely scroll past multiple items about, like, Binance—which sounds like a cutesy name I’d make up to mock a crypto company but is in fact real. I’m eating treats, stop trying to sneak in vegetables!
We group crypto news with items about how people are using TikTok’s new voice filter to say “pop your bussy at Old Navy this holiday season” because neither would be possible without the tech industry. But plenty of things are the result of the tech industry. Cloud-based supply chain management software (I Googled “tech companies” and picked one) is the result of the tech industry. Are you going to start making me read about that? Well, cloud-based supply chain management isn’t interesting, you say. This isn’t either!!
Internet culture is broad, and crypto is a niche interest. I don’t mind it existing, but I’d argue that linking it to internet culture misunderstands its relevance to the regular person’s experience online. When you go to the New Yorker culture section, there’s nothing about ATMs.
But more than anything, I just don’t understand crypto, and the fact that other people do only adds to my frustration. Like when my friends talk about Real Housewives.
Whatever. Other people can keep LARPing finance. I can keep refreshing the page of my favorite mommy blogger who disappeared from the web last October without warning and never came back. Both are, I guess, equally pointless.