# Visual code of cypherpunk, and lessons from subcultural aesthetics we should remembe... | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 12:39
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-aUkVqsDW6t4
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUkVqsDW6t4

## Description

I want to take builders on the turbulent ride through how subcultural and social movements used their visual codes when spreading globally, and what design tasks are still ahead of us on the way to making Ethereum cypherpunk again and onboarding the next billion users to Web3 at the same time.

This ride will include three stops:
1. waving one's emotional state into the collective identity
2. using shared aesthetics as a signal of belonging
3. coordinating a collective design process.

Speaker(s): Ira Nezhynska
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Cypherpunk & Privacy
Keywords: Coordination, Identity, Design, communication

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Music] [Music] let's tune the wipe so we all want Mass adoption for our products and we want these products to be loved and used by many and yet we have one heavy anchor that will always hold us back from Mass adoption a visual language or Cypher fun let me show you what's happening visual language consists of two core layers the symbols they carry meaning and cultural baggage and the styles styles evoke emotions they always go together when it comes to how we respond to visual messaging a positive style in a posit a positive symbol in a positive style evokes Joy a positive symbol in a negative style makes rather negative impact think about toys in the horror movies a negative symbol in the positive style can cause confusion but rather it bring am amusement and think about Halloween and a negative symbol in a negative style evokes nothing like fear and disgust people try to distance themselves from everything that lives in this quarter well adoption lives there how do you think where cyer fun is let's see the first symbol anonymity mask traces back to guy folks who earned a reputation of a fail terrorist and actually never fought for democracy while Alan Moore tried to recover this image uh in the comics via Vendetta making it a symbol of vigilantism but later Hollywood successfully shifted the message adding a narrative with a fear creating taglines and a lot of blood today is a symbol of Cypher funx now here you already see a second symbol hoods that was originally associated with monks the knowledge Keepers which is good beginning but later that became a symbol of secret societies uh many of which practice ritual murder and dark magic if such a thing exists and recently Hollywood dressed all the Assassin in hoods adding a nice layer of death and blood to the overall image today Hoots is a symbol of Cypher funs well here you already see the next symbol which is a common line romance which Again by Hollywood in a form of digital rign together with the technor Style presented technology as a global threat to everyday life and last style I would like to mention is uh glitch effect which was a way for early internet artists to present to to visualize a system vulnerability and the beauty of breaking it but for normal people the glitch effect evokes the same feeling as breaking glass now how do you think where on this metric Cipher funs are well fortunately we have a century of subcultural movements that can teach us how to ease this tension between our heritage and the past and the mass adoption needs so here are three main lessons I want Cypher Franks to hear first choose joy as a strategy cyer Frank looked like it was designed for post-apocalypse but privacy should not look like paranoia it should look like Freedom just look how uh Pride movement turned the protest into a celebration they didn't promote a better hiding spaces they promote they they made visibility powerful and joyful itself and you may say me rainbows but people love rainbows ethereum love rainbows so we already want this Joy uh next lesson aim for Simplicity cyer visuals require technical tools to reproduce them but if your grandma and even you cannot draw this symbol with anything that you have in your hands right now it will not spread uh extension Rebellion teaches us how to do they created a symbol which a child could draw in seconds and every human could reproduce with anything they have around they later gave this symbol to communities and communities style it with their own wipes to represent their emotions around the movement and the movement went great Global and last example Embrace VAR Embrace Evolution uh black panthers used powerful yet very aggressive imagery usually containing weapons because of this aggression the movement didn't achieve the reach they hop for but the movement did not die the new generation learned from the past and took over and moov from displaying weapons to displaying words from we prot prot ourselves to we deserve to be here and they reached millions and more so if I were here an incarnation of all the subcultural movements from the past I would ask our eem to not not make ethereum Cipher fun again but to make it a new Cipher fun and maybe just maybe it will also have a different name thank you [Applause] thank you very much so we have a bit of time to ask a few question raise your hand if you have any question over here yes who's doing it right who can you call out or are there any examples um that you've seen this week of different ways to evoke this um sentiment in our ecosystem visually mean who is doing right Cypher fun style or who is doing right in general we are here right now so we have some more question over there hello um thank you for the talk so my question is from the kind of negative examples that that you presented it seems like a lot of them were kind of you know serious tough masculinity focused and crypto as an industry is also quite masculine in terms of just people who tend to you know run the companies uh if we gather up everyone who works in crypto mostly it's men and uh one of the positive examples that you had was you know the pride flag for example example which is something that is quite challenging to traditional masculinity so how much do you think that plays into the current branding issues that crypto experiences thanks well I'm so glad you asked this because like maybe 20 minutes before the talk I just cut off one slide because I needed to fit in five minutes but after the glitch effect what I wanted to say is the cipher fun imagery has a very heavy gender cordin and is all white male narrative which is exactly what you tell about [Music] um well um all those uh movements that I showed they actually show the equality of everyone and what I really love in ethereum here right now in Devcon is we have more of non-white people so it's really good that white people are not dominating here um also if you study cyer fun movement itself uh there were a a lot of uh Regional um directions who actually didn't go for this American uh White narrative cyer fun and actually uh for the original cyer frun movement Hollywood did a lot of bad job for us because as much as we were trying to narrate great uh well developers don't do a lot of good job for the visual communication so they did a lot of good stuff for like like vision building uh but Hollywood knows how to show masses what exactly the government wants to see and if and in general nothing goes on the screen which can harm the government so even V for Vendetta the author of we Vendetta wasn't involved in the movies because he didn't agree with the flag Wess and bloodiness of the movie creation the original Comics had a very deep narrative that you actually need to see where he comes from did I answer your question thank you so there's a last question over there okay if I may I would like to have like a very small comment I absolutely do agree with you that uh the imagery we are using as holding us back and this is like spot on uh and well job but job well done but uh none of the images that you showed are actually connected to the original Cypher Punk movement because they didn't have any image it was just a a mailing list uh uh very traditional mailing list that do didn't even allow to attach any imagery the closest that they they were getting to having any visual identity is when fre of the people uh from the original Cypher Punk movement were uh futured on a cover of Wire magazine and they were wearing masks but they were very different mask they have nothing to do with guy folks and it was not their idea to wear the mask that's one thing uh second they used one pretty cool image that became like really associated with them but not with the movement but one of the campaigns that they were running like in the early '90s there was this Danger that US Government will U impose a surveillance mechanism on a communication was like Clipper project and what Cipher punks did was like B basically they hijacked Intel logo and instead of Intel Inside they put Clipper inside and this was became like a sticker that they were Distributing in many many places and so this was like quite successful but everything else that you showed was has absolutely nothing to do with cyberpunks and and one last thing cyber punks the name itself it's not the that they created they were not considering themselves to be a cter cultural movement it was basically a joke from someone uh who was looking at them and and U commenting how they are like approaching things but they were not punkish at all absolutely yes and that's how branding works it's not what you say about you it's what others say about you so I I encourage you open your laptop and Google hacker icon and see what you have in the just Google Cipher funs and see what Google gives you and it's yeah that's the whole point there the world and we know which powers are engineering the reputation of cyer funs which is going to the minds and hearts of people outside of Crypt bubble and the call is not being passive around this but actually do actions to create the image that we want to have not what happens because some other very