Hey friends

I was around 12 years old when I logged on to the internet for the first time. We had bought a used PC running Windows 98 from a friend of the family and purchased a dial-up modem from the local internet service provider.

My mom wasn't really tech-savvy and she had no real interest in what she called “going into cyberspace,” so I basically had free-reign over that computer and the digital realms to which it connected, so long as she didn't need to use the phone line.

As an adolescent at the turn of the millenium, there was really only one thing to do online, and that was to talk to friends on MSN Messenger. Facebook wasn't around yet and I wasn't aware of things like messaging boards and ICQ, so this was as social as I knew how to be online. In the early days, I'd just talk to my IRL friends online. My mom hated this, because we lived in such a small town that I could have easily biked over to see them in just a few minutes, and avoided racking up her internet bill. But she didn't see what I saw. She didn't see the potential that this technology could unlock.

As more and more of my generation got family computers and internet connections, and inevitably learned about chat, our social circles began to enlarge. Maybe a friend would be chatting to their cousin who always told the funniest jokes, so we'd connect and start chatting, and they'd tell me that I reminded them of someone from their class, so we'd connect and start chatting; so on and so forth until we had a network of dozens of people to chat with, many of whom we'd never met IRL.

Like I said, I grew up in a really small town, so by the time my social circle got into the tens, I felt like I'd levelled up. I was a “city kid” now, only my city had no limits, it was infinite. It was conceivable to me that I could eventually have friends to chat with anywhere in the world!

Hitting the Wall

In the mid 2000s, Facebook become available to regular people—initially it had been exclusive to college students—and many of my IRL and online friends immediately signed up. It was a very different site back then. Initially there wasn't even a central feed of updates. There were just individual profile pages that one could visit, not unlike its main competitor, MySpace. On your profile, you'd put your interests and share little text-based updates on your wall. That's actually why we all got so excited about Facebook, because by this point MySpace was such a big part of the online cannon of my generation and we were all eager to see what other kinds of social experiences could be created.

Facebook's big innovation would come a few years later with the News Feed. This vertically scrollable timeline gathered all the newest posts from all your friends, saving you time over visiting profiles individually. This new meta (no pun intended), was the thing that set Facebook apart.

Little did any of us know, by removing the friction of having to go to the “home” of the content you wanted to see, instead having it all aggregated into one place, our ability to consume media would grow exponentially. We were training ourselves to parse information quicker and quicker, setting the stage for what would come later.

Becoming Twits

By the time Twitter hit the mainstream, I was already in university. Facebook was ubiquitous and every person you met at any social function would surely send a friend request. Twitter felt different. It seemed to me to be a place where you could go to sort of scream into the void and see if anyone else was interested in what you had to say. And interestingly, many were.

It wasn't long before I became connected to a number of online communities around open source software, civic engagement, and video games. It felt complimentary to Facebook, and the interface was so stripped down that it felt like an escape from the oppressive white and blue infinite feed to which I’d become so accustomed.

But then I made the cardinal mistake of any social network: I let my feed fill up with politics. You see, I've always been a big ol' lefty. In my college years, I probably would have used the word "progressive" but after I discovered Bernie Sanders and went on my first trip to Europe, which included some time in Scandinavia, I was a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and I wanted everyone to know it!

Here I was, an early twenties fine arts major in a small college town, getting into arguments on twitter with people from Florida, Canberra, and Singapore about the merit of trickle-down economics (there is none) or whether or not Dick Cheney is a war criminal (he is). I would get so worked up sometimes that I couldn't sleep. I'd toss and turn all night, at times even logging back on to continue the debate. What was worse, I knew I needed to make a change, but I felt addicted to the raw intensity of this kind online feud.

I was so competitive, but I knew that I wasn't really winning anything. I was only losing myself.

Cutting the Cord

I think it was around 2012 when I deleted my twitter account, vowing to never return. I went through and deleted every post manually, and then deleted the account itself. If I remember correctly, I had to wait like 30 days and then I received an email saying my account was officially gone for good.

For the next decade or so, I lived a relatively ascetic, intentional online life. I connected with friends on Facebook and Instagram mainly. I used Whatsapp, and various other messenging apps, I lurked reddit and youtube, asking the occasional question or leaving the occasional comment, but I never went back to text based feeds like twitter, for fear that it might be too toxic of a place for me.

After all, in this same period I'd seen how twitter had been used by Trump during the Obama presidency, as he rose to fame by propagating the birther movement. And then I saw him become a candidate, run against Hillary Clinton, and even win the 2016 election. And alongside his rise was a rise in vitriol, hyper-partisanship, and even a spillover to IRL violence.

Seeing that, there was no way I was going to go back. It would take...

A Major World-changing Event

In 2020, I had just begun a new relationship when the pandemic hit. Everything was thrown into absolute uncertainty. It affected everything: my career, my health and health of everyone around me, and even my new relationship, which struggled to get off the ground with the constant stresses of the pandemic and the difficulty of “lockdown dating.”

The relationship didn't last the year, and combined with the state of constant fear, political tribalism that had reached a boiling point, and the physical distance between me in the city and my family and friends, many of whom either lived in the countryside already, or moved there during the pandemic; I was in need of connection.

Due to all the uncertainty in my life around that time, I had become very obsessed with personal finance. I was coupon-clipping and points-hacking, budgeting and debt-snowballing, and it made a measurable difference in my life. In fact, many of my friends and coworkers were starting to direct their personal finance questions to me, and I realized, I really liked helping. If I was going to learn something useful, why not share it with other people? I’d be told many times I was a great communicator and a natural teacher.

In January 2021, I came up with an idea. I would go back to twitter, but this time I would use the platform to share helpful tips and ideas, and as an added buffer, I wouldn't use my IRL identity, instead, I would create a pseudonym. Something fun, easy to remember, and versatile in case I ever wanted to pivot to other kinds of content. I was already becoming interested in investing and even developing a little crypto curiousity, so I thought, who knows, maybe I would write about those things one day.

Thumbs Up Finance Was Born

The funny thing about my journey as a personal finance writer is that I was always unapologetically me, by which I mean that I didn't know how to conform to the typical investor bro content that this type of content’s consumer expects; and frankly I didn't want to. I wasn't some dentist side-hustling with a dozen rental properties or a digital nomad living off dividend investing. I was just a person who was nerding out on the thing that had become the most consequential element of my life through the pandemic: money.

Twitter surprised me back then. There was this renaissance happening it seemed. Trump and most of MAGA was off the platform, in a mass exodus to Rabble, Gab, Truth, and whatever other echo chambers they’d been relegated to. Most of what I was seeing in my own feed was optimistic, energetic, exciting. There was a lot of enthusiasm bubbling up around new technologies, especially, blockchain.

I was wary of crypto, especially Bitcoin, but also I had my characteristic insatiable curiosity for all things technological so I needed to learn more. I had a blog, which I ran via the patronage platform Buy Me A Coffee. To my surprise, a lot of people were supporting my little personal finance musings, either one-off, or ongoing. I told my patrons that if I could raise $100 that I would use it to explore "decentralized finance" and report back with some written content.

My first $100 came in, but it didn't go far. Back then L2s essentially didn't exist, so I burned up almost the whole hundo just setting up a wallet trying to make a swap. Any normal person would have given up and called the whole thing a scam, because they didn't see what I saw. They didn't see the potential that this technology could unlock.

Purple Pilled

I kept reading everything I could about cryptocurrencies and blockchains. I started watching Bankless, reading blog posts by Vitalik and Karl Floersh, and asking questions on twitter with the bravado of a more established and knowledgeable user. I was determined to break through all the noise to find the highest quality signal, and to match its frequency.

I had learned about PoolTogether by way of a Bankless interview with the founder Leighton Cusack. In it, he explained the concept of prize-linked savings accounts and something just clicked. Crypto wasn't just for hucksters and moonboys. Crypto could enable genuinely beneficial financial primitives for people anywhere in the world.

I wanted to make some content about it, but I was so risk averse, and I was still spending every dollar from my 9 to 5 job paying down my debt. So I put out a post on twitter saying that if I could raise $100 or more on Buy Me A Coffee, I would make an explainer and tutorial about PoolTogether's new USDT pool on Polygon.

Someone saw the post and tagged Leighton and he responded that he had just personally bought me $100 worth of coffees. Little did either of us know, this would change the entire course of my life.

I made a video and an article which was, for that time, the most substantial and detailed content about PoolTogether anywhere on the web. In fact, there wasn't content like that about any protocols really. I immediately recognized a niche that I was uniquely qualified to fill, and I decided I would make it happen.

I learned about the PoolTogether DAO, and their PoolGrants program and I submitted a grant proposal. To my surprise, they approved it. I began making content about PoolTogether and then using the money I earned (whatever I didn't burn on gas) to make more content about more DeFi protocols.

My social klout exploded. I began getting offers to do other work. And I got more confident too, reaching out to protocols, basically cold pitching them on my content skills. And it worked! Between word of mouth, grants programs, and the bounty board on Layer3 (something I’ll miss dearly), I was getting a lot of work!

I made content for Index Coop, Sushi, Balancer, Harvest, Loopring, Notional, Cryptex, Zapper, and many more. At the same time I had grown to almost 1500 followers on twitter in under a year and had a high level of engagement, often being retweeted or even having my articles shared first-hand by big accounts.

Then Came Elon

If Leighton Cusack had opened the door for me, Elon Musk would unknowingly close it. My growth stagnated almost as soon as he took over. The platform I had begun to use for sharing newsletters, twitter's own Revue, would be shuttered, and the first platform I pivoted to, Substack, would see their links aggressively deamplified (aka shadowbanned).

Around this time, I made a hard pivot to being a crypto-native content creator, and I went all in ideologically speaking. I stopped using Medium and Substack to focus on Mirror, a platform with posts minted as NFTs, their data stored on Arweave. I was experimenting with every decentralized social networks, and was early to Lens and Bluesky and relatively early to Farcaster (early enough to earn the Farcaster OG NFT).

I didn't want to see something that I worked so hard to build destroyed by a single man's megalomania so I decided to work hard to build my network outside of twitter so that one day I could relive the catharsis of a decade earlier, when I had deleted my twitter account.

Now much of what I would tell you at this point in my historical recounting has already been covered in-depth in my newsletter. And I really do love when people check out the back issues. But let's speed-run it:

• I joined the PoolTogether growth team and made a ton of great content about version 5 of the protocol, aka The Hyperstructure.

• I began writing about the intersections of decentralized tech and decentralized society (anarchism). This helped me grow my audience and develop yet another niche. My post Punks In Space was among my most popular.

• During a period of extreme uncertainty at my day job, where it looked like my whole division would be laid off (fortunately we weren't!), I experimented with raising funds onchain to purchase a Macbook Air. I didn't raise enough, but it wouldn't matter because...

• My article about PoolTogether v5 was featured in a Layer3 quest as an optional collectible and, combined with my Celestia airdrop (which I sold way too early unfortunately, missing out on tens of thousands), I made enough to buy my Macbook Air!

• The DEGEN airdrop and the Farcaster OG NFT, would prove that my decision to join Farcaster was a very good one, providing me with enough money to pay off my entire debt, pay my taxes in full, and take a massive vacation (more on that later).

• I was an early adopter of the Hypersub onchain subcsription platform. And my blog post about onchain patronage, was featured on another quest platform, providing me another pretty decent financial boost (pun intended).

• All the while, I continued writing content about the intersections of decentralized technologies and decentralized societies. Most of which were, given my political beliefs, very left coded.

De-baited

All this awesome growth on decentralized social networks like Farcaster has meant a diversity of opinions have sprung up. I remember when I joined, it was pretty much just Silicon Valley folks, and I felt so out of place. Sure we agreed about the value of technologies disrupting the status quo, but we disagreed about just about everything else. Pretty early into joining, Dan Romero, the co-founder of Farcaster and I were already having little debates about capitalism.

Then I found the /cryptoleft channel. There I was able to share the stuff that interested me from leftist crypto creators like The Blockchain Socialist, Kevin Owocki, and a variety of other more obscure creators. And of course I could share my own vision of tech-enabled libertarian socialism with my newfound friends.

But for every leftist and liberal that joined there was at least one more conservative or Trumpist, and with the election season getting into full swing the heat was beginning to rise. I started to see people not just debating each others ideas but each other’s right to exist. Muting became more common, as the rhetoric turned ugly.

I just kept on doing what I've always done. I'm a provocateur to be sure, but I'm also quite reasonable, usually if we debate I'm going to focus on the points you're making and whether or not they hold water. That said, there were a few people I muted because they said some incredibly dehumanizing things about Palestinians and implied that their genocide is justified. Beyond that though, I continued to debate in good faith.

One thing that started to irk me though, was the way that Dan, someone who is clearly smart and successful, could be so apologetic to the worst capitalist behaviours while simultaneously equating every hint of socialist policy with Stalinist or Maoist authoritarian violence. I'd seen him make this connection repeatedly and I was eager to push back.

I saw a post from a popular caster Oxen making the case that a lot of web3 is left-coded. To which Dan implied that the fact that these technologies generate revenue makes them capitalism-aligned. Now, this is completely false, and felt like the perfect opportunity for me to weigh in, given that this is what I've been researching and writing about for more than a year by this point.

I made the argument that co-operative ownership is not misaligned with generating revenue and that leftist ideologies come in various forms. I also made a subtle jab at Dan, mentioning that a book he'd pointed to in a podcast once as one of his favourites, The Little Black Book of Communism, was heavily refuted Red Scare propaganda that turned a whole generation into black and white thinkers with respect to capitalist vs socialist critiques.

Then it got really ugly. We argued about flawed math in the book, and he kept trying to strawman my argument to the idea that I was in favour of Stalinist policies. What's funny about that is that I literally advocate against centralized power, including overtly criticizing state communism. I don't refer to myself as a Marxist, despite being better versed on his ideas than most of his conservative critics, and I absolutely don't advocate for Leninist or Maoist approaches.

Like everything I've ever written about, I like to operate from a base of clarity about the subject matter. I'm curious and inquisitive, and I don't default to status quo opinions. I believe in maximizing freedom for people both by diminishing the power of the state and by minimizing all power structures, especially the power held by capital holders, because of their undeserved and inequitable authority.

There is a word for this belief system and it's the polar opposite of what Stalin believed in: it's anarchism. I don't always use that term because it has too many negative connotations. Not only that but it can be quite vague sounding. As I pointed out in “Whose Left Is It Anyway?”, the best way to describe my politics is Libertarian Socialism.

Anyway, this whole interaction made me realize something...

It's Time for a Break

No I'm not about to delete my account and disappear for another decade. I've grown a lot as a person since my twenties, and Thumbs Up, while only just a fraction of my IRL personality, packaged into cute little caricature, is nonetheless a very meaningful creative outlet for me. And again, regardless of what Dan might think, I'm not here to convince people to become tankies.

I'm doing exactly what I was doing back in 2021 (and indeed even back in 2001): looking at new and interesting technologies, seeing the potential they offer to empower human connection and coordination, and trying to share that with as many people as possible.

And so I'll be doing that for the foreseeable future. But I do need a break, and as I mentioned earlier, I've been saving up for a vacation for a while. And, funny enough, when I went to book one, some other opportunities and obligations came up, so I decided to combine them all into one long “sabbatical.”

A few days after this newsletter goes out, I'll be departing for a roughly two month long trip to various corners of the world, to disconnect, to recharge, to work, to visit with friends, to see family, to go camping, to sunbathe, to read books, to network, and so much more.

During this time, it's my intention to recalibrate my social battery, to take time away from feeds. To stop fighting with people I disagree with, and to try to connect with them despite our differences.

So to all my faithful readers and patrons, I just want to be clear, there will not be a September issue of Thumbs' Update. There may be an October issue if I have enough time, and access to a computer, but that is TBD.

I will absolutely be back for November though. So stay tuned. Now how about I leave you with some...

Recommendations

This month’s issue drew upon so much of my own techno-nostalgia, so I wanted to share a blog post from Jason Kottke about the show Halt and Catch Fire and how nostalgic it made him feel. I have to say I loved that show and felt similarly.

And I also feel like you could apply the metaphor he references from the show to blockchain technologies too. After all, web3 is just web.

Dan and I got into a stupid argument, that to be fair, I kind of egged on with my comment about his favourite book, but in the end, all I was trying to say to Oxen was that cooperatives are a natural fit for web3 and they do generate revenue. Don't take it from me, take it from Metalabel founder, Austin Robey ⬇️

If you’re not familiar with Austin, make sure to follow him and his new project, Subvert.

Finally, last month I wrote all about Julian Assange and his role in the cypherpunk movement. If you haven’t checked out that piece, I definitely recommend it. In the article, I point to several modern cypherpunk technologies, including XMTP, a messaging protocol that turns Ethereum wallets into end-to-end encrypted chat apps. It’s beyond cool, but it just got even better as Ephemera, the company behind the protocol, acquired and open-sourced the leading chat app!

Here’s the announcement thread from Ephemera’s CEO, Shane Mac ⬇️

Lastly, I’d love, if you want to show your support for my content and encourage me to come back in full force, for you to consider becoming a patron. There are two ways to do this. One off, by minting this article. This method shows me that you like a specific piece of content and helps me guide my topics and style going forward.

Or you can support by becoming a patron on Hypersub. This method shows support for all forms of content from Farcaster posts, to video content, to writing, and even includes a few little perks for you!

But that’s enough talking. It’s time to log off.

Until next time,

Thumbs Up

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This issue of Thumbs’ Update was brought to you thanks to the gracious support of my Subs Up patrons:

• thisiszinger.eth

• 0xgetoffdeez.eth

• riotgoools.eth

• taliskye.eth

• cpoetter.eth

• jamesbeck.eth

• maxorgel.eth

• qubyt.eth

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If you want to become a supporter and unlock special perks, check out my onchain patronage susbcription, powered by Hypersub ⬇️

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And for the privacy minded patron, I accept anonymous tips with Zcash to my shielded address:

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