# No friends but the hash function: Descent into the Social Layer

- Channel: [ETHBerlin](https://streameth.org/ethberlin)
- Date: 2025-06-17
- Duration: 24:24
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/68513e914ac43bf73d20c77c

## Description

Despite six months research, the central question remains unclear to me: just what is the Social Layer? I will instead bring you on a tour of the competing definitions swirling around in my mind. We will descend, iceberg theory style, from the surface level or seemingly superficial definitions the Social Layer is the community or Crypto Twitter and then fall further into stranger, more esoteric answers, such as the Polycentric Ethereum, transglobal agorist fraternity and, of course, Technopolic cult of the hash function.

## Transcript

Okay, I'm going to start off with some old-timey quotes. This is a protocol Berg, so I think you can get away with a little bit of a philosophy. The first comes from Martin Heidegger, in everything well-known something worthy of thoughts still lurks. So this is a quote from Heidegger, so you And what I want to really imply here is that something like the social layer is of course very familiar to us, so we're all familiar with the social layer. At the same time, the social layer is clearly something that's evolving quite extensively in the last while in Ethereum culture, so I want to talk about that as well. And then I want to look at the ways in which I think it's evolving, which I think is related to something like a pragmatic turn. There's a pragmatic turn in Ethereum, I think most of us recognize this, and I think it has two forms, one of which I'm going to call today Dankratism, and then the other which I'm going to call post-ideological pragmatism, and that's going to be part of the BlockWorks extended universe. So the other quote is a bit of a sub-theme, so this is like a bonus track. What ideas are convenient to express to inevitably become the most important content of the culture? It's from Neil Postman, and Postman is effectively implying the idea that the media we use, so in our case that's like crypto Twitter, podcasts as well, affects how it is that we think about what is most important to us, which of course is Ethereum, right? So the media shapes how we think about Ethereum. So for those of you who are not familiar with the social layer, this is basically what my research is supposed to be about, so I'm supposed to be doing this Ethereum Foundation social layer funded, sorry, Ethereum Foundation funded social layer project, but I never really get around to it. I always get distracted by different things, but in the time that I've done that, these are the main insights that I found, the best ways to describe the social layer that I've come across. So just in case you're not familiar with the social layer, this is what people generally think. Now there are more deeper esoteric understandings, but these are the general ones. The first is the idea that the social layer is the community. You'll tend to see this in crypto media, so sometimes if you're reading Unchained, for example, they tend to have these articles where they say, here's a tweet, right, the tweet is referring to some drama that's happening, and it will say the social layer is reacting to this particular drama, right, so Unchained, just using the generic sense that the social layer just means everybody who's involved with Ethereum in some kind of capacity, so the social layer is just everyone. In bank lists, they tend to go with this idea that the social layer is the people, and actually the origin of the term social layer, if I go back far enough, it goes back to Vitalik and Vlad Zamfir, of course, but really the popularization of this term is true bank lists, and for a while they varied between layer zero and the social layer, and they even had a podcast series which was about the social layer, and in that sort of sense, it's just the people who are most engaged in Ethereum constitute the social layer. Okay, so what's the next understanding? This is the academic understanding. It's the distinction between off-chain and on-chain. So in the academic world, we have the idea that on-chain refers to the rules as they are inscribed into the protocol itself, right, the code-based rules of the protocol, and then there's the off-chain governance, meaning the management and maintenance of that protocol by the developers, researchers, and organizers, so the Ethereum Foundation, etc. Then there's also another tradition which I'm not talking about today, which is the definition of polycentrism, so trying to understand Ethereum in the sense of like a polycentric system. We're going to talk about that at Dapkon, and I'm not going to talk about that here today. There's a term that myself and my colleague, Professor Dunica Kavanagh, tried to get people to use but was never really taken up, which is blockocracy for the same concept. Another person who's really strong on this is Trent van Eep, so Trent has work about the commons, it's not specifically about the social layer, but he gives us this bipartite structure, this way of understanding, say, the spatiality of where the social layer actually is, which I find extremely helpful. The first is the idea of the commons, right, so this is ACD, EIP, developers, researchers, and organizers, but then there's the embedded capital circuits, so ETH and then ETH in terms of staking, and then there's block space in the sense of who actually uses the block space, the Dapp layer, so that's the space, like, where the social layer is. Now, for those of you who are a little bit more lunar punk, I wanted to give a little bit of a reference to this side of it, that we shouldn't maybe keep in mind the more radical reading of the social layer as effectively a form of agorism, a counter-economic space, a kind of enclave, right, outside the traditional society that's maybe reached beyond stage one, a small counter-cultural movement, to being something which is an economy outside of the traditional system, although not completely free from it. Konkin says that at this point in an agorist society, it begins to contaminate and affect the traditional one. Okay, that's for a different talk, completely unrelated to Waseem. Baldwin, he looked great in that movie, I completely reject the premise about Kingdom of Heaven, the crusaders did nothing wrong, so we'll come back to that later. Okay, so big picture talks with regard to imaginaries. So I think that there are now two different forms of the pragmatist imaginary that exist, but first I need to talk about what are imaginaries, so what do I mean by this? Again, it's another academic term, so I do apologize, I am an academic, so I do use these terms like polycentrism and off-chain, on-chain and imaginaries. So what do we mean by this? It is common in the blockchain literature, so most academics use this term all the way back since 2015 to refer to blockchain communities. They say blockchain communities can be characterized by the belief systems they have, and these belief systems have the character or trait of an imaginary. So what does it mean? From Charles Taylor, the way people imagine their social existence, meaning things like my sense of how it goes between me and you, the sense of legitimacy that we have, and also how it goes on between your fellow people, that's one of the phrases that he uses. It is not a theory about these communities, it's how these communities see themselves. Also Sheila Yazanov talking about socio-technical imaginaries, thoughts of publicly performed visions of desirable futures. So every culture, every cultural imaginary has an endgame. If you're a retail, Ethereum retail user, then the endgame, the cultural ossification for you might be something like reaching 10k. We reach 10k, we will be happy. That's sort of the endgame as they imagine it. If you're an OG cypherpunk, then this will be a different story altogether. You might be imagining that the endgame is when we reach the end of the roadmap, and the values of cypherpunk, decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, and credible neutrality are baked into the protocol. There's nothing more you need to do. Everything is completed. So it's how you imagine how it goes between you and other people, but also the endgame. Now when we're talking about imaginaries, it's important to say, as a Mac McCormack who I'm drawing on here, that culture is a bit of a monster. So for those of you like myself who are culture vultures, digital ethnographers, or folklorists of something like Ethereum, there's a point where you have to accept that you're never really going to fully capture the monster. So what Mac McCormack was referring to was when he was trying to understand the Delta Blues back in the 30s and 40s, that there was no records. People didn't keep records. Error problem is different. There's too much information. It's a deluge of information, and in this situation where you're facing a monster, what you can do, or what most folklorists suggest you do, is that you look at the infrastructure. You look at the highway, the river, or the Delta itself, and I'm going to do that a little bit today with using our infrastructure, our media ecology, which of course would be crypto Twitter and the podcast. So what is this pragmatist turn? So I'm going to end up doing on the social layer. We'll probably take this as a turning point. I think most of us recognize that in the last, say, three to six months, there's something identifiable as a pragmatist turn, right, especially at the Ethereum Foundation. One of the quirks of modern discussions about Ethereum is also that we find ourselves more and more referring to Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation almost as if they're the same thing, right? They're becoming a little bit conflated. There's a dependency relationship there that we probably need to address at some point. Nonetheless, I can look at something like Dankratism as an example of this new pragmatism. Now, this Dankratism could be any other name. We could call it Thomassism. We could call it Starkism. It could be a Dread Pirate Robert situation where we just exchange the names in as we wish, but really what I'm trying to capture is the type of person who looks at Ethereum in terms of its competitive position, that that's what's really of interest to the Dankratist as a pragmatist. Now, the other aspect of this is the near-term thinking. The Dankratist is interested in, say, the two, three-year question, the two, three-year time frame. Okay, so what else are they interested in, right? What characterizes the Dankratist is, I think, by the way, by competitive position it means, right, keeping Ethereum's position, but also it means staving off Solana. The great repress of our culture is that we know Solana is a realistic threat and so we're trying to be pragmatic to kind of institutional apps and the political. Now, also crucial here is that the Dankratists are not by any means opposed to the traditional values, right? This is not a situation where I'm trying to say Dankratism and OG Cypherpunk, and by OG Cypherpunk I mean Metallic, I mean Xiaowei, the Civil Culture Council of which I'm a member, so I should just mention that. I don't think this is one of those talks where I'm saying, okay, Dankratism and OG Cypherpunk are in some kind of tension with each other. In fact, they seem to be in a productive relationship. They seem to be able to work together pretty well. Okay, oh yeah, and the other thing I wanted to mention is that what is characteristic of Dankratism is a certain minimization of the language. So if we look at, say, Tomas when he's tweeting, he'll tend to use these terms security, privacy, and censorship resistance. Those are the three values that he'll name check. This is coming from the Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto, but the other values of permissionlessness and decentralization have tended to go missing. So one thing you can observe, and I don't think this is an existential threat to Ethereum, I don't think this is the worst thing that's ever happened, and of course I don't think Barnaby or Alex Stokes or Tim Biko are in any way consciously doing this. I think it's unconscious. These are all unimpeachable Ethereans who believe in Ethereum as a project, but it is noticeable if you start looking at the documentation that we no longer see the words decentralization or permissionless really crop up anymore. So yeah, culture vultures like myself notice these small quirks. Now I do think that this might be linked to the media, like the media that we use. So DC Investor captures this better than I could. He says, just use the term decentralization, ignore all the others. This stuff is extremely difficult to talk about consistently within 140 characters without people nitpicking when you choose to use one another. Who's doing the nitpicking? People like me, right? Saying that you're leaving out words, and the reason I'm concerned about this is that over time if we do not say these words, right, if we do not say cypherpunk, if we do not say decentralization, permissionlessness, no one else is going to do it. It's really up to us, and that over time the social layer may find itself unfamiliar with this terminology. Okay, and I think it's the truncated nature of crypto Twitter which forces us to see these words as complicated, difficult to narrativize in our narrative churn kind of culture, and so that's where the pressure is coming from. Now that was originally what I was going to talk about. I was going to talk about the disappearing language, right, the Stalinist disappearing of the terminology, but I got rugged in the best possible ways. My original paper, my original talk, up until the very day that the slides were due, so like the evening I came back, I'm going to submit the slides, I'm going to make this case that the language of cypherpunk, the language of decentralization, etc., needs to be emphasized more by people at the Ethereum Foundation, and then lo and behold we get this post from Xiaowei, where Xiaowei very, very much uses this language, uses this terminology, and not just this, she's doing it in an unapologetic way as well, I want to emphasize, but she does what I was going to recommend. So I was going to recommend that we should see these two as our foundational texts, so the make Ethereum cypherpunk again, so Vitalik's post, and then the Ethereum cypherpunk manifesto should constitute a core source material, let's say, so yeah, so Xiaowei rugged me, but in the best possible situation. Okay, now that being said, the Xiaowei, so apologies for that, but I couldn't resist, what I definitely, what Xiaowei's post raised for me is, it kind of made me think about the nature of the way I was treating, say, Dankratism versus OG cypherpunk, so the Dankratists are interested in the near-term, and then the OG cypherpunks are the ones who are thinking of the, let's say, the 10-year roadmap, right, that's the way that you would maybe divide these people, but I think in Xiaowei's post you can see something like an OG cypherpunk that's a little bit pragmatist itself. Now there's something I think is important to raise here, first of all, that there is a strange, unaccounted-for topic that we haven't discussed much, which is, how did the Ethereum Foundation suddenly become this very, very central directive force in Ethereum culture? If we had thought about this maybe two or three years ago, the Ethereum Foundation, or maybe even two years ago, a year and a half ago, the Ethereum Foundation was seen as an entity which was kind of like centralized a little bit, people didn't think about it that much, they didn't talk about it that much, and now it's completely flipped, and now effectively the Ethereum Foundation is like recognized as leading and directing Ethereum culture, probably something of again, the great repress of Solana, right, the need to be staving off the trash. Now if the Ethereum Foundation is going to be in this position anyway, then I think it might as well take this approach, which I think is going to raise a word which some of you may have recognized, or a phrase some of you may have recognized and immediately recoiled, which is Ethereum alignment, a curse term, nobody likes it, but I do think in Xiaowei's post you see something like, okay, a good version of Ethereum alignment, so what does she do? And the idea there is that the Ethereum Foundation, even though it can't exert unilateral power, right, so it can't force the apps in the ecosystem to be permissionlessness or decentralized, but what I can say is those projects that we are going to back will need to adhere to these particular values, so using the Ethereum Foundation to effectively demarcate boundaries about the types of projects we want to see in the ecosystem, encouraging more of a world where we see Docky and Fileverse and so on, and so it's a pragmatist use of a cultural imaginary or cultural values, and yeah it is effectively right, Ethereum alignment, except done in a more interesting way, it's called DeFi Punk criteria, I don't know who came up with DeFi Punk, but that would never have passed if I had a chance to do anything about it, that had it came past the Civil Culture Council it never would have gone anywhere. Okay, so this brings me to a little bit of the fun part, I want to talk about my ideological enemies, the CPVC podcast industrial complex, so there is another type of pragmatism that some of you may have noticed, but others maybe aren't paying attention to, because you're not so plugged into this kind of thing, which is fair enough, right, most people are not listening to crypto podcasts, they're far too sensible for that, but there is another type of pragmatism out there, which I think is more focused on the idea of ETH the asset in terms of its performance, so it's actually not interested in whether Ethereum wins or beats Solana, but whether ETH the asset performs, and in fact, if Solana was number two and say ETH was, or Ethereum was number five, it wouldn't matter to this person if ETH went to 10k, right, it would be the same situation for them, because they're disinterested in the, say, culture or the ideology of these assets, all that matters is like the portfolio goes up. So the other aspect is post-ideological, if you listen to these podcasts, the disinterest in values is palpable, and in fact the term post-ideological is not me saying that they're post-ideological, that is a term that I stole from one of their podcasts, that's a term that they use confidently and sort of as an example what they believe is the best position to go. Now whether you can be post-ideological or not, you can nitpick that yourself. Now this culture, I think, is the one that's most influenced by the specific media that it finds itself immersed in, so crypto Twitter, of course, is a, you know, a horrible thing, right, we're all trapped there, it's a little bit of a dystopian black mirror situation. The effects, right, of how people think about Ethereum in this context are always bad, so again the truncated form means you're not going to spend time getting into like decentralization in detail, there's a constant narrative churn, there's a discontinuous feeling of now this, now this, now this, there's people being taken out of context constantly, there's an adversarial aspect to it as well, so if you are trying to construct a media that a community should not build itself around, Twitter would be especially late-stage Twitter. Now the other side of this that maybe people aren't paying attention to as much is the podcast, so there are different types of crypto podcasts, there's like a nativist Ethereum media, meaning, say, the Daily Gui, and then there are, say, bankless, which is kind of ambiguous these days, but then you have, say, Unchained, and then you have the BlockWorks extended universe, where there is a whole culture of these podcasts which are VC oriented, right, they're venture capitalist oriented, the people who are speaking on these podcasts are venture capitalists, and they have venture capitalist interests. Now what stands out to me as a business school lecturer, so for my sins, I'm not just in crypto, but I'm also a business school lecturer, the two worst things that someone like myself, who's interested in culture, could have ended up in, but that's the situation. If you're watching these podcasts, I can't help but recognize the types of language, the ways of thinking, as business students who've taken their time to apply this business school mindset, this venture capital mindset, to something that isn't business schooly, which I would consider Ethereum. So for example, when they talk about ETH, the primary thing that they're interested in is ETH is a product, and they're trying to figure out how to sell that product, so this is a quote from John C's long post about Ethereum's North Star, that if we just figured out what ETH is as a product, everything will be okay. We figure out how to sell ETH to the market, everything will be okay. The other thing that tends to come up is Ethereum is a company, sorry, the Ethereum Foundation is a company, which I think is like exactly what the Ethereum Foundation is not, it's a non-profit emerging in a very very unique and strange cultural context, where it's sitting over a decentralized blockchain, it's very very far from the country, so Ethereum is not a company and stop trying to make Ethereum a company is my position on that. The other is revenue, the language of revenue, a real economic value, you could not get a more business school mindset of thinking about things, imported I believe from the business school to Solana, to Ethereum land today as well. And then last but not least, North Starism. Now North Star is a particular bugbear of mine, because when I was teaching in the beginning, when I started in the business school, I would hear my entrepreneur colleagues, I would hear my marketing colleagues talk about North Stars and they would use this all the time, this sort of like North Starist language. It comes from growth startup culture, it's the idea of we just need to find like a North Star that we can effectively sell or market and then we'll figure out what to do. Now my position, Ethereum has no North Star and that's not a problem, stop worrying about it and stop being so concerned about dealing with the influence of post-ideological pragmatists and their ways of seeing the world. And the reason for this is because Ethereum is not a product, it is not a company, it has no North Star, which is a good thing and what I think Ethereum is, and I'll kind of end on this ridiculously complicated sentence, but I think it's a fun one. Ethereum is a socio-technical, polycentric, trans-global fraternity of multivariant stakeholders ignited by a rich array of cultural imaginaries, but which are ultimately bound together by the ineliminable core of the cypherpunk values of decentralization, permissionlessness, censorship resistance and credible neutrality, or your own variation thereof. Themselves philosophically secured by a confident social layer, in particular the ideological driven parts of the community. All of which is to say is that Ethereum, if it is anything, is very very far away from being non-ideological. The one thing we know about Ethereum is that it is ideological. I'll end there. We have a question from our wonderful tool, so should we move away from Twitter? How and where? So I wrote an article a few years ago about this, where I advocated that crypto needs to escape Twitter. It's four block works, ironically, my ideological enemies, but that's back when they were cool I guess. So here's the thinking on it. At that time I thought it might be possible to make the case that we could escape crypto Twitter, we could go to Firecaster, we could go to Lens, and what I think is one of the fundamental paradoxes of the crypto community, the Ethereum community as well, is that we are extremely harsh on our own apps, even though those apps are actually the ones that are living up to the premise of what we're supposed to be doing. So Lens and Firecaster are both based on layer twos, right? They're products that are genuine, they're authentic, they're built according to actual Ethereum principles, but we treat them as jokes. We treat them as like not to be taken seriously. Why? Because they don't have enough users. Why don't they have enough users? Because we're kind of making fun of it, it's just that kind of loop. I believe that the only way that we ever escape crypto Twitter at this point unfortunately is when crypto Twitter itself implodes and we're forced to go somewhere else. We need disaster to hit Twitter itself for us to leave. Make the disaster happen? I don't know, I guess encourage Elon crashouts would be one method. I don't know exactly, some dark arts with Elon would probably be the way to go. What do you think about AT protocol as an escape route? Which, sorry? AT protocol, ad protocol as an escape route? Oh, Blue Sky, sorry. Yeah, so I mean like most people, you know, I did the thing of looking at Blue Sky, looking at alternatives, so I have tried to do that, but I think we're, yeah, another word I was thinking because I, the Heidegger quote at the beginning, I was thinking of my graduate school life and the term that I was trying to sneak in somewhere is like Gestelle, which Heidegger uses for like a technological entrapment where you just kind of find yourself stuck in this, whatever this technologically mediated phenomenon is. So I mean we can go to Blue Sky, it doesn't really matter so long as we're not on our own apps, it remains with that fundamental paradox for me. It's the, why would anybody use, like why would anybody believe us when we don't believe ourselves, is the thing that always haunts me about like the overall project. That's true. We have time unfortunately, we have a lot of questions, but we can do that after, so we go to CVS and have a nice, all right, a mixer here and discuss it later, and there's a lot of questions, but give a big round of applause.