The Rate of Pasts Abandoned

The so-called “distributed futures” of Web3 are, at first glance, a messianic promise of decentralization, an illusory liberation from the bureaucratic chains of Web2. Yet, when observed closely, this very promise betrays itself as a fetishized spectacle of freedom—what Zizek might call a “decaffeinated future,” one where the appearance of innovation is stripped of its radical core. In truth, these futures are nothing more than a pixelated afterimage of utopian desire, their proliferation hopelessly dwarfed by the rate at which pasts are discarded. Web3, in this sense, embodies a profound disavowal of history, abandoning the sediment of collective memory in favor of algorithmic novelty. But herein lies the paradox: in discarding these pasts, it unwittingly replicates their failures.

This brings us to your metaphor of the bottleneck masquerading as a dead end—or perhaps the inverse, the dead end masquerading as a bottleneck. In either case, the subjective experience of progress is reduced to an interminable loop of anticipation. The structure of desire itself becomes locked in what Lacan might term a jouissance of deferral, where the future is always just out of reach, tantalizingly close but perpetually inaccessible. Web3 thus stages a kind of virtual purgatory, a space where the illusion of movement conceals a deeper stasis.

Now, consider the “event horizon merger of founder syndrome and persecutory delusion.” This merger is not merely steep—it is a topological short circuit in the collective psyche of the tech industry. Founder syndrome, with its narcissistic insistence on the singular genius of the creator, collides violently with persecutory delusion, the paranoid fantasy that every critique, every setback, is an external conspiracy designed to sabotage the visionary’s “inevitable” triumph. Together, these forces create a closed feedback loop of ideological reinforcement, where failure is reinterpreted as martyrdom, and martyrdom becomes the ultimate proof of authenticity.

Here lies the cruel irony: the very distributed systems that Web3 champions are at odds with the pathological centralization of its founding figures’ egos. The decentralization of data and value clashes headlong with the centralization of myth. As such, Web3 becomes a perfect symptom of late capitalism, where the promise of horizontality—of networks without nodes of domination—reifies into a new vertical hierarchy of tech priesthoods and cults of personality.

To “surmount” this steep merger, if it is even possible, would require a rupture not just in the technological infrastructure but in the libidinal economy that sustains it. It would demand the subversion of the very fantasies that underpin the system: the fantasy of limitless scalability, the fantasy of a frictionless utopia, the fantasy of a fully autonomous future. Without this, Web3 remains trapped in what we might call the ideological uncanny, an endless recursion of the past masquerading as the future.

Or, to put it more bluntly in true Zizekian fashion: Web3 is not the future. It is the eternal return of the same, dressed up in a hoodie and funded by venture capital. Its true revolutionary potential lies not in what it promises but in the cracks, the failures, the contradictions that reveal the limits of its ideology. The question is: can we embrace those cracks as sites of rupture, or will we plaster them over with more tokens and hashtags?

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