One of GritCult's podcast guest appearances. For the full list, see Podcast appearances.
| NewForum | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Episode | |
| Show | NewForum |
| Host | NewForum (@newforum_nco) |
| Released | March 2022 |
| Length | 1:04:26 |
| Watch | YouTube |
The Connection Between Meta-Modernism, Post-Modernism & Memetics In Web3 Culture By GRITCULT is an episode of NewForum, hosted by NewForum, with GritCult as the guest (March 2022). NewForum's first anonymous guest, GritCult ties memetics and metamodernism to DAOs, localism, the line between culture and cult, and the case for anonymity online.
Summary
NewForum, a show from the Newcoin Foundation about decentralised social applications, introduced him as its first anonymous guest. Despite the lecture-style title it is a conversation: a panel of hosts puts questions and GritCult answers at length. He describes the persona as an ironic, tongue-in-cheek identity that grew out of small decisions rather than a plan, and frames his thinking through memetics: ideas as atomic units with their own histories, moving through social structures that he insists are far more fluid than the word "structure" suggests.
Metamodernism, in his telling, goes a step past postmodernism because the person and the meme keep reverberating off each other: publishing anything changes the superstructure of the internet, which is why a meme rarely goes viral twice. Being anon fits the idea, since an online identity lets a person write their own narrative. He argues that content, not data, is the new oil, pointing to crypto firms that now behave like media companies, and expects corporations to give way to small, community-run groups. Underneath sits localism: governance should stay within a carrying capacity, because coordination and communication are the hardest problems humans have.
His working definition of culture is a set of memes held by a group and marked by in-group language such as "gm". A cult, he says, is the same structure turned up in intensity: the narrow, obsessive end of culture, the gap between a hobbyist and someone obsessed. He expects decentralisation to splinter culture into more niches, fringe politics and secessionist pressure, with DAOs growing, splitting into sub-DAOs and changing shape. Conventional intellectual property he calls a government-enforced engine of rent seeking, and he predicts creators will compete on branding instead.
The closing stretch defends anonymity as a right. He says he is less anonymous than people assume and meets contacts offline, but argues that without the option of anonymity persecution follows, and that permanent on-chain records and reputation let communities police scammers from the bottom up. He calls Bitcoin an ideological technology and says the push for individual freedom is what keeps him in Web3.
Key moments
Timestamps link to that point in the episode.
- 2:26 A persona nobody planned
it formed naturally it wasn't like a conscious decision to do this
- 6:53 Every post moves the superstructure
as soon as you put something out you change the superstructure of the internet
- 9:38 Content is the new oil
a lot of people were saying like data was a new oil but like really it's like content because everything is so socially driven
- 12:22 Humanity's two hardest problems
coordination and communication are probably the two largest problems like humanity has overall
- 40:47 Where culture ends and cult begins
i think a cult is like a very focused and narrow phenomena of what culture actually is
- 48:20 Brand beats the patent
what we're going to see in the future is like a huge kind of emphasis on like branding and creating a brand around your intellectual property rather than just having the intellectual property on its own
- 51:46 Less anon than you think
i'm not as anonymous as people think like i meet people off the internet all the time
Themes
- memetics and metamodernism
- localism and small communities
- content as the new oil
- culture versus cult
- anonymity as a right
- branding over intellectual property