Author: Matti Source: Wrong A Lot Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance
"The great advances of civilization have all been achieved by nearly subverting the society in which they occurred."
-- A.N. Whitehead
Face/Off
Face/Off
"Face/Off" is a 1990s classic film that tells the story of FBI agent Sean Archer, who undergoes experimental face-lift surgery to impersonate the notorious criminal Custer Troy in order to thwart a terrorist plot. However, when Custer awakens and assumes Archer's identity, a high-stakes game of cat and mouse ensues. Each is trapped in the other's body, forced to navigate their rival's life while trying to reclaim their own. When Sean Archer and Caster Troy swap faces, and ultimately lives, they embody the existential dilemma of being "the other." Archer struggles with the chaotic freedom afforded by Troy's evil deeds, while Troy revels in the orderly facade of Archer's family life. This reversal of identities suggests that identity is performative, shaped by circumstance and choice rather than inherent essence. It blurs the lines between good and evil as each person is forced to confront their inner shadow selves, ultimately suggesting that revenge and redemption are two sides of the same coin. The swapped faces represent the deceptive shadows that obscure deeper truths; the characters' journeys force a reckoning between authenticity and appearance, highlighting how social roles, personal trauma, and ambition can imprison the soul. All roles imposed through norms are cages that tame human will. Yet, they provide stability for society to function. It's only a matter of time before will breaks free, unleashing chaos and then reestablishing stability. Tools: Crypto's Identity Crisis I've come to believe that technology is the substrate on which society unfolds. It creates a largely invisible environment, a network, like a theater with its own physical and more abstract rules. I first encountered crypto in 2016 when I read the Ethereum white paper. To me, it represented a fundamental shift in how human society governs itself. Later, I read Nick Szabo's thoughts on social scalability, which comprehensively summarized my scattered thoughts. In today's discourse, blockchain is reduced to a database solution, and trust minimization is dismissed as an ideology. Everyone is chasing the money, but in this case, it leads to a dead end. We are slowly eroding the need for trust minimization, first for performance, then for use cases, and ultimately for whatever governments and corporations are willing to buy into. If cryptocurrency were a character in a movie, it would be the story of a techno-anarchist drug dealer who transitions from a cocaine-smoking Wall Street trader to a tech founder, eventually becoming a JPMorgan board member and spending summers in the Hamptons. Two major memes currently in the crypto space sum up this sentiment. The first is "believing in something," which essentially reflects the cryptocurrency's inability to have a firm vision of what it aims to achieve. "Something" should be understood as "nothing." Price is the only thing that matters. The second meme is *"Pragmatism First." Centralized chains, single sorters, performance optimization, censorship compliance, and so on. Pragmatism is slowly eroding cryptocurrency's true unique selling point: trust minimization, enabling social scalability. In other words, reducing reliance on trusted third parties. This revolution seems to be devouring its children. The early revolutionaries have become too wealthy to care, and now they are reminiscent of the bankers they once rebelled against. 2021 was about the future of alternative financial rails in France, while 2025 is about packaging trust-minimizing machines as trust-maximizing tools and finding a willing buyer for a pile of empty promises. Indeed, it's all a game of trade-offs. One cannot be a decentralization fundamentalist, as that's unrealistic and nearly impossible to commercialize. When the pendulum swings too far toward centralization, people should realize that the entire meaning is lost, and we're peddling a kind of financialized nothingness. In other words, the financialization of finance. Profit for profit's sake. This characterizes cryptocurrency as a tool to be sold, a means of hyper-financialization. But cryptocurrency is more than just a tool; to understand it as such is a profound misunderstanding. Cryptocurrency is an environment. Returning to the first paragraph of this section, the very fabric upon which society unfolds has been transformed, and there's no going back. Environment: Electronic Drama Cryptocurrency will inevitably consume everything we believe makes it possible. It's not a tool—"a stock on a chain." It is a completely and utterly new environment. It is an extension and transformation of the market, the invisible environment in which we participate. I'll illustrate this by quoting McLuhan: "The interplay between the old and new environments creates many problems and confusions. The chief obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deep-seated habit of viewing all phenomena from a fixed perspective." McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s that print technology created the public, while electronic technology created the masses. He understood that the invisible environment was changing, and that society would change with it, but he pointed out that official culture was working to force the new media to do the work of the old. We cannot expect individuals and institutions whose survival depends on the comfortable functioning of old processes to see the new environment for what it is or to understand its nature. "Poets, artists, detectives—anyone who sharpens our perceptions—are often antisocial; they are rarely 'well-adjusted' and unable to go with the flow. A curious connection often exists between antisocial types: their ability to see their environment for what it truly is.
This need for interaction, for a kind of antisocial force to counteract it, is exemplified in the famous story of 'The Emperor's New Clothes.' The 'well-adjusted' ministers, with their vested interests, see the emperor in finery. But the 'antisocial' boy, unaccustomed to his old surroundings, clearly sees the emperor wearing 'nothing.' The new environment is clearly visible to him." Thus, cryptocurrency finds itself caught in a conscious, futile attempt at integration, while unconsciously, it has given rise to a new world that people are slowly but surely choosing to enter. While the industry is busy funding machines that conform to the old order, a minority of users are quietly expressing dissent, living by the rules of the new media. "Young people instinctively understand the current environment—electronic drama. They live in myth and depth. This is why the huge gap between generations. Wars, revolutions, and civil uprisings are all interfaces in the new environment created by electronic information media." True cryptocurrency adoption doesn't come from optimization. It stems from a desire to participate. Anyone can become a banker, and we can debate the boundaries that separate banks from runaway projects, bankers from runaway developers. The internet, and cryptocurrency in particular, has shifted the educational process from "packaging" to "discovery." Instruction is no longer important; manuals are obsolete. McLuhan suggested that people reject goals and crave roles. They crave participation. If this was true in the 1960s, it's even more true today. "Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we still think fragmentedly, on a single, separate level. Mythology means placing oneself within an audience, within an environment..." In the spirit of Face/On, cryptocurrency is facing its own identity crisis. Trust-minimized environments, which truly enhance social scalability, are being challenged by prevailing pragmatism or price action that reduces them to mere financial instruments. Just as Sean Archer and Custer Troy were forced to inhabit each other's worlds, cryptocurrency pioneers now struggle against the very systems they sought to subvert, often adopting tendencies toward centralization and trust maximization that rob them of their true essence and unique selling point. This tension between cryptocurrency as an environment and as a tool mirrors the film's core themes: the blurred lines between authenticity and appearance, and revolution and assimilation. This is the "deceptive shadow" that obscures cryptocurrency's deeper truth, just as the swapped faces in Face/Off obscure the true identities beneath. Yet, cryptocurrency's "electric drama," as McLuhan described it, continues to unfold beyond attempts to force it into old paradigms. While official culture (including a large part of the crypto industry itself) strives to make new media do the work of old media, a minority of users are unconsciously and silently expressing dissent, choosing to enter a new world built on different rules. These are the "antisocial urchins" who are unaccustomed to the old environment and may have noticed that the emperor "has nothing on." They represent the participation and investment that drives true cryptocurrency adoption, rejecting mere optimization in favor of a new mythical interaction with the internet universe at people's disposal. Ultimately, the choice of cryptocurrency, like that of Archer and Troy, is about facing reality and embracing its transformative power. It's about understanding that cryptocurrency is not just "stock on a chain" or a database solution, but a fundamental change to the fabric of society. A completely new environment for living, thinking, creating, and participating.
Weatherly
Anais