AD-VERSE. #101. Your first mid-life crisis.
News so new we don't have words for it.
Web3 is a mid-life crisis for ‘10s tech
Ryan over at Garbage Day has a great take on Kickstarter’s pivot to web3. The original crowdfunding site has decided that allowing people to promise to deliver pet projects to people, and then likely as not failing to do so, is a perfect fit for blockchain technology. And on some level, they’re right.
In many ways, Kickstarter’s weird crypto project — and the blockchain aspirations other aging web 2.0 companies are pushing on us right now — are kind of like watching a middle-aged man buy a boat. He doesn’t need to buy a boat. His life will be significantly more complicated, and likely worse, after he buys the boat. But he has somehow convinced himself that he needs to buy this boat because he has done the math and realized he is going to die soon and he thinks the boat will fix this.
The tokenisation of businesses for the sake-of-it is sure to only increase over the next few years, as tech businesses of the previous decade find themselves not getting the attention they believe they still deserve.
Of course Meta (the company who wastes all of our time by forcing us to read parenthetical reminders that it is the company formerly known as Facebook) “perfected” this with their metaversal rebrand - after failing to do it with the non-launch of their own cryptocurrency.
We should probably start a “DAOification” tracker for these sorts of things. Is that the right term? Too specific? “Tokenification”? “Web3 whitewash”? Let us know your preferred term for probably-unnecessary pivots to web3 and we’ll make it a thing.
Ironically its “the youth” (a phrase those due a mid-life crisis in advertising call Gen Z) that have made this play the best so far. When an anonymous, very quickly not-anonymous, founder of the Pixelmon NFT series was in the process of being doxxed for delivering 💩 instead of a quality 3D Pokemon knock-off (the same thing to many people, but not to the bullish "investors”) it came to light he had previously scammed the public via… at least two kickstarter projects. New technology, same playbook.
So yes, Kickstarter - web3 is probably the technology for you. But maybe a shiny red sports car would have been easier on the budget? If you’re a brand manager and someone is asking you to do web3 for the sake of it (“CEO: where’s our NFT collection?”) maybe implying this might be a signal your brand is having a mid-life crisis is a good way to stop it? Let us know how you get on.