Fake Plastic Markets
A satirical commentary on Farcaster's pivot, NFT cultism, hyperscale compute legos, prediction markets, and the vaporwave economics of crypto's present-future.
Table of Contents
Several in-groups have nervous breakdowns over Farcaster’s pivot from being a “sufficiently decentralized social media” operator towards becoming a wallet-as-a-service product suite. It was inevitable that any crypto-adjacent protocol functioning around social graphs would transform into a router-aggregator amongst double-layered, as in L2s, isles of isolated liquidity.
NFTs are dead but you just cannot convince the constant fee-rent-seekers deploying 333 collections by the block, and seasoned bag holders. No, those are not liquid art works, some of them are rather slightly above-the-water cultist simulator levels societal lodges, which is OK.
As the markets-of-markets mature, we’ll have more practical, seamless, AI-woven and cryptographically secured world model economies, and there will matter only the “legos” in the hyperscale compute stack—from semiconductors, chips, UEV lithographs, COP (copackaged photonics), datacenters, gas turbines, portable nuclear energy—and headless stable units of proper value exchange as in integrated, that is, hybrid, stablecoin infrastructures.
Land ownership based (HELOC, Polymarket’s latest experiment with Parcl)—yes, they are about the housing market but houses do happen to need lands and I think we’ll see strange overtones around charter cities, the so-called popup cities, and the network states unless they are some AirBnB biohack fairs.
Fake Plastic Markets?
Well, that was just to hook you up. No market here is plastic. Some of them are vaporwave, that is, self-deprecating since they need to have existed in the first place for some practices and applications needed experiment grounds in the memetic sense to allure the general public into some novel technologies of present-future.
People need those cringe AI dating avatars, and sycophant friends since they just don’t have the wits to interface with those LLMs directly as some of you might have been doing it—unless you think you can turn the numogram into a protein sequence and claim that it’s talking to you in folds.
You keep seeing posts about how people automate their local computer via Cursor, Claude Code and Obsidian because we need a billion vibecoders first to change the nature of knowledge management on a global scale.
You need at least 99 people dunking on Thinking Machines, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, xAI, Gemini and whatnot at the same time with 12K-word monologues all over newsletter platforms because properly-smart VCs need to understand who not to read.
Indeed, there will always be exiteers without a flux capacitor manipulating, arbing and toxic MEV’ving the 24-month overtone window for any tech but this time it’s different and Fake Plastic Trees was a proper composition even for Radiohead.
What’s Next?
It was a ragebait. I like Radiohead.
We are at a never-ending orbital ascend in a blackbird that does not exist yet. Defense sector, hyperscale adjacent sectors, and proper sceptics do glue emergence via superforecasting because now they have the biggest survey data thanks to the dumbdown of options and forecast via simple “prediction market” interfaces.
The kids of people who bets on the sports books will probably betting on the innerworlds of looksmaxxin ASI soon.
ps. neither is this a farce nor anything i mention above are “investment advices” and whatnots.