dokodemodoor

teddit

my loosely held, emerging opinion on crypto’s parallels to fast fashion:

the fashion industry produces over 100b products a year, with SHEIN alone adding 10k new product per day (!!). the average product is worn 7-10x before it’s discarded.

imo the SHEIN-ification of fashion hasn’t been a net good. it has eroded the cultural and material value of what we wear.

people don’t build identities around disposable clothes the same way they build identities around LVMH, Rolex, Levi’s, and other enduring brands that compound meaning over time. 

the “everything is a token” mantra puts crypto much closer to SHEIN than to LVMH. what once required thought and community (launching a token) has become a game of quantity over quality, and humans aren’t built for infinite new things.

the “conceptual Dunbar’s Number” puts a psychological cap on what we can meaningfully track and care about and so the norm in fashion will too apply to crypto: engage an average of 7-10x (if that!) before discarding.

I used to study projects carefully, trying to understand their core ideas and culture. Gradually, I found fewer things worth taking seriously.

At least fast fashion gets worn a few times and has utility, but what do these rapidly created and discarded tokens actually give us? Some market energy and attention? Some emotional value (even if it's disappointment)? Can these be considered consumer products in the crypto space?

I hope crypto consumer products amount to more than this, but what can be truly "consumed" in this field remains unknown. Perhaps, as a friend told me, we should always view this as a financial industry - thinking about it in terms of consumption is fundamentally wrong.

I believe there are a couple of differences. If we talk about crypto as crypto - well that's  finance. 

If we talk about Blockchain - it's an technology/infrastructure.

If we talk about web3 - it's a movement.

Trying to understand projects and then buying their tokens is the same as buying stocks - that's financial instruments. And that's exactly what cryptocurrencies are. But the ideology behind full scope of Web3 is way way wayyy bigger.