I studied philosophy at university. This is not by any means a brag, just a statement of fact, as I managed to in the end scrape a 2:1 from an unprestigious institution after two and a half years of procrastinating, daydrinking and pursuing my own ‘extra curricular’ education. But the piece of paper I have stuffed in a drawer somewhere says that I studied philosophy and psychology- joint honours- which proved to be the perfect educational foundation for the role of surly dry-a-glass-with-a-dishcloth- and-listen-to-your-problems barman that I spent the proceeding half a decade embodying. Embodying like a narc who is so deep undercover that he no longer knows which was is up and which way is down.
So. I mention the study of philosophy because it has shaped the way my brain works, or at least it has exacerbated and strengthened a mode of being that was already latent within me. See, I question everything. This is not a good thing. It makes you borderline unemployable for one. It makes you largely unwilling to play ball within any institution, as all institutions are built upon dense layers of nonsense and that’s-the-way-it’s-always-been type assumptions. And the question everything mode is certainly not a mindset conducive to a life of steady career progression punctuated by relaxation via mainstream cultural consumption. Oh no no no no no.
But seeing as I am stuck with the questioning and the endless curiosity (is this a good thing? Can you learn how to turn it off? Would you really want to?) I might as well tell you what I have been pondering as of late. And that is a simple four letter internet acronym- WGMI.
If you use twitter you have heard it. If you are in the crypto space in any capacity you have heard it, whether in DM groups or Discord channels or one-on-one messages. You may have seen it plastered on merch. You may have heard someone utter it in real life, possibly pronouncing it as wagmee. I’m talking about the phrase WGMI which stands for We’re Gonna Make It. And as I said I can’t stop thinking about it.
A pet theory of mine- unrefined but containing the kernal of something true, I feel- is that we are in a time of profound change. The old world of the monoculture is dying out and a new decentralised Sovereign Individual type landscape is emerging. Rome is falling and all of the interesting stuff is happening in the catacombs, as it were. I’ve said all of this before. There’s a reasonable chance you are here because you either agree with this thesis or you have come to similar conclusions independently.
So as old things die, new one slowly rise up in their stead. Culture begins with cults, new religions and belief systems start out as nomenclature, rituals and experiences that over time codify. And we are seeing this occur, I believe, with all of this WGMI talk. I mean just look at those four words- We’re Gonna Make It. We implies an in-group and an out-group, the faithful and the non-believers, Gonna implies a certainty bordering om predestination and Make It implies the salvation of a Promised Land for the faithful few.
It’s purely religious in character.
Now, the idea that religion itself can be separated away from the rest of human life is itself an Enlightenment driven idea and I am neither theologically qualified nor particularly interested in retreading the Ninian Smart led debate about the dimensions of what constitutes a religion. But. It’s worth keeping in mind the nature of what lies behind a lot of crypto involvement.
People like to argue that they are rational, that various crypto coins and tokens and what-have-you are sound financial investments due to the numbers and the whitepaper and so on. Due to tokenomics and other things that I don’t really understand. And that may well be true enough, as far as it goes. But this all feels like post facto rationalisation to me. You become involved because of the heart, because of faith, because of a need to belong and all of these mimetic and quasi-religious type yearnings and then the rational talk comes afterwards. As an outsider (or at least someone very much on the periphery) the whole scene makes much more sense when viewed through this lens.
It’s funny, we- and this especially goes for people interested in tech- like the idea of transcending the messy world of human emotion and being able to operate on a plain of logic. But base humanity has a way of always leaking through because everything that is programmed is programmed by a person, and so they inevitably bring human assumptions and drives and beliefs with them, whether they want to or not. Look at Deep Blue. This chess playing machine beat the greatest grandmaster of all time Garry Kasparov not due to superior strategy alone but because the IBM nerds who operated it essentially managed to psyche Kasparov out using gamemanship and psychological tactics away from the board. It was a story of humans beating a human with a machine as a mere conduit or go-between.
The humanity always comes through.
And so the human drive for WGMI- the clarion call of crypto- is belonging and acceptance. Believe in this thing, perform the rituals (tweet gm every morning, hodl coins, scramble to mint the latest generative pfp drop etc) and you will be rewarded. You will Make It to the promised land of financial independence beyond the woeful mimetic samsara of the rat race. The fear and desperation and unhappiness wrought by precarious work and rampant infoation will end.
And this might well be the case. Articles of faith do not have to be necessarily improbable any more than scapegoats do not necessarily have to be innocent. There’s every chance that submitting in full faith and humility to this new cyber-religion might make you wealthy. Investing your money into something is fun. But investing your soul, your spirit, all of your time and hopes is a different matter. And that’s where problems lie.
I hang out in the odd NFT discord group from time to time, in an effort to try and understand the world. These are not detached, rational investors or people who are having fun speculating with money they can afford to lose. These are kids who are staking everything they have and more on some jpeg collection (or some penny stock alt coin) in the hope that it ‘moons’ and so they can escape their hard-scrabble, lonely life.
Typing WGMI as a little in-joke, with various shades on the spectrum of irony but shouting it as an exhortation or as a desperate unsure prayer-like plea is quite another. And this is what bothers me. I’ve been broke, I’ve been a degenerate gambler, I’ve been pretty much entirely devoid of hope of making a better future for myself outside of a prayed-for windfall via some madcap scheme. I see myself in some of these young posters who have been ‘rugged’ and are desperate and who out of panic double down on the same questionable ‘strategy’. I’ve been there. And I know that nothing external can ressurect you from these doldrums.
Yes, it’s good to believe in a better tomorrow. This is the kind of faith that undergirds all actual religion and that keeps you going. But said religion is based on more than materialism, on trying to find meaning and escape through money, no matter what crypto asset you use to keep score.
Now you might read all of this and think NGMI- that I’m Not Gonna Make It. Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what ‘It’ means. And that is the fundamental things that still goes largely unquestioned. I’m not saying that NFTs or Crypto or anything else is bad, I’m just asking you to really think about what do you mean by ‘it’, what does ‘it’ look like for you, when you look inside yourself and look beyond all of the shared assumptions of the online culture (or less kindly echo chamber) that you find yourself a part of?
That’s the real question. And you don’t need a mid tier philosophy degree to answer it. You just need to honestly search your conscience.
This is a great one, Tom. I think in the highly individualistic modern world we're finally turning back from individual values to communal values. The crypto culture I'm observing (not from the outside but still not from the very inside of it as it seems to me) is a lot about we/us and not about a single person or a single company. This is true about web3 culture in general - decentralization, open-source, DAOs, etc. Everything is about community, belonging to a group or several groups. Our social cult also has local memes, emojis, phrases, etc. these things occur (often from jokes) and spread naturally if they reflect the beliefs of a community, often ironically, as you mentioned. This is exciting to see it and participate in it (we need an official abbreviation for the soaring twenties (or at least for the soaring twenties social cult), which we can, for example, use as a hashtag or smth).
And thanks a lot for shilling the story! It was a pleasant surprise.
WGMI
Being quite heavily into the crypto space myself it’s quite interesting to see all this slang develop. WGMI is often uttered ironically, often with little thought. More of a rallying call. But really what the majority of this slang is about is to show whether you’re in or you’re out. Just like any cult, club, religion or any other group phrase you’d like to use.
You need to know the slang.
WGMI