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Adios and Kurt Cobain

Well, it’s come to this. I co-founded Decential Media in 2021 with the hope of succeeding at telling the stories of the people who are making blockchain technology, web3 and on-chain options for finance, art, music and commerce a reality. It’s been a wonderful ride. I am incredibly proud of what we’ve done at this little media outpost. But it has failed in the larger sense that we never found a way to pay the bills. Journalism isn’t cheap. Writers deserve to be paid for their hard work, and we have been running for many years on our initial investment money. Alas, that money is now gone.

So, Decential Media is closing shop.

This is the penultimate Web3 Rewind newsletter. We will no longer publish original journalism as of March 1 on our web site, though we do have a few film projects we will see out. Of course, I wish this wasn’t the case. At the most selfish, this is because I would avoid the feeling of failure I feel. Of being wrong and unable to right the ship I knew was sinking.

One of the hard-to-miss takeaways from any time spent on social media these days is the constant warring between generations – Millennials mocking Baby Boomers, Gen X being ignored. I don’t remember this ever being a big thing until recently, but it has made me reflect on my generation, Gen X, both in how it’s portrayed and how it shaped me. There is a crypto connection here if you just stay with me.

In journalism school I was lucky enough to take a class taught by Mark Danner. He’d written The Massacre at El Mazote by then, one of the most harrowing accounts of mass murder you’ll ever read. It first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker, where Danner has been a staff writer for years, and then became a book. He’s an amazing writer and reporter and I was in awe of him, to put it lightly.

I don’t remember the exact assignment, but we were to write an essay for Danner about an icon. I chose Kurt Cobain and I remember the first few paragraphs getting called out by Danner. He liked my writing, holy shit, and I’ve never forgotten that feeling. With all these generational hissy fits that I mentioned, I thought again about Cobain and the effect Nirvana had on Gen X. And just to set the tone here, I’m going with the often heard judgement that Gen X doesn’t give a shit about anything. It’s widely held among members of my generation as well, so I feel I’m on solid ground here.

What it boiled down to was not that we didn’t care, it’s that we were on to the consumer-industrial complex and its never-ending shilling and screams for attention. Do you remember the movie Over the Edge? It scared the hell out of me in 1979. But it’s depiction of teenage boredom and despair as a group of kids become increasingly violent was how it felt in the late 70s. It was terrifying.

If I’m being honest, I don’t know how to deal with Baby Boomers and the Free Love hippies who stank to high heaven back then but somehow became stock brokers in the 1980s and Trump voters in November. And by deal with them, I mean I’m not sure if they had this strain of wariness about the culture’s insistence to sell sell sell – I think they outright rejected it and tried to make a Free Love alternative, whereas Gen X has gone along with it while giving the biggest eyeroll you’ve ever seen. I can say this about my generation, we caught on to the con from the word go.

That was picked up on and used by Nirvana in a way that seems lazy but is anything but. Cobain’s journals go into quite a bit of detail about his plan to gain fame with his band. He always knew what he was doing but had the gift of making is seem like he’d just rolled out of bed. When he screams “With the lights out it’s less dangerous / Here we are now, entertain us” form meets function and he summed up 65 million people’s thoughts and feelings perfectly.

Gen X was somehow jaded enough to get it that commercialism was trying to screw everyone, that as latch key kids we were – maybe -- street smart enough to see through the commercial con that Baby Boomers lapped up because for them it’s far better to drink Ovaltine than to go to war against the Germans. Is that too harsh?

The crypto industry could use more of this skepticism. So much of it seems out to get hapless users. I get random texts nearly daily trying to get me to engage because I’m convinced people have linked me with crypto. Then there’s $Trump which is robbing people blind in broad daylight with a full-page ad taken out in the Washington Post. Yet what you see in crypto is bro culture that couldn’t care less who gets hurt unless somehow it’s them. I’m looking forward to a cohort in crypto that realizes the con, maybe winks at it, but also ignores it in a way to make clear that the tech is transforming people’s lives. That’s important, yet gets lost in the endless stories of pump-and-dump, fraud and general douchebaggery.

 That’s partly why I’m a bit cynical right now. Watching Decential fail to gain an audience has left me with the conclusion that people in crypto only want to make money. They don’t care about the folks who could ostensibly make them rich, only that they get rich. I was also naïve in thinking that because there is a lot of money sloshing about in crypto that we, as a media company, could get some of that as advertising to keep the lights on. Not true.

In the bigger picture, though, I’ve employed journalists and filmmakers for the past several years, and I feel great about that. My Gen X malaise is in fine form and it’s good to remind everyone which generation had the best music and films of any generation before or since. I wonder what Cobain would’ve made of Bitcoin, or crypto in general. Of course, we ate him alive. But goddamn he was good. – Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media 

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.