Worth considering in light of Vitalik’s recent essay “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” which addresses how blockchains lost their original cypherpunk roots to financialization and the accompanying statist interventions.
Neither is working for a multi billion dollar multinational tech firm designing ways to spy on users, get them addicted and manipulate their worldviews, but that doesn't stop most of the people who do from fantasizing and larping.
Idk, having a day job so you can fully engage in your passions without having to compromise the thing your passionate about for commercial concerns, while maybe not ideal seems at least consistent with the ideals of punk.
Having a day job is not the issue. There are plenty of day jobs where you don't have to sell out your supposed principles to pay the bills so you can spray graffiti at night. Have you seen what's happening around us? The effect of these day jobs are the thing they're supposedly fighting. They're the ones making the world worse while they call themselves the resistance. I just hope the money is worth it.
Don't get me wrong, that's great, but what exactly are we saying here? Fundraising for a good cause is all that is needed to make something punk? Are church collection plates also punk?
Punk rock was very simple but it still required a skillset; most punk rock fans probably hadn't invested the time and effort to be able to participate past supporting those that did.
Punk movements seem to have always suffered from this sort of unacknowledged lack of unified or organized abilities.
And their aversion to the mainstream and anarchic tendencies often leave them and their goals in absolute limbo.
Punk rock at least had the benefit of "if you can listen and agree, you're in" though. To be remotely included in cypher/cyberpunk practically requires an education of some kind, especially in the post-"mobile OS is all I need" world.
Berlin was the spiritual center of the cyberpunk movement back in the 80s.
Berlin has changed so much since then. It was a divided, post-apocalyptic city, “occupied” by two foreign powers. Lots of soldiers, draft-dogers, musicians, communists, and ex-Nazis.
Now it’s a pretty boring capital city, just like Bonn was back in the day.
I’m glad to see it’s still doing cyberpunk type stuff, like having bitcoin markets.
I really don't get his "technological vision". I don't know why anyone would prefer his "decentralized stack" over the "traditional stack" that he intends to replace. He doesn't even try to convince us about why it is better.
https://vitalik.eth.link/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html