Blockchains have been built and used to coordinate value in a decentralized scheme at a global scale. This is why Bitcoin and Ethereum requires lots of electrical power. Each transaction in the network requires consensus from thousands of machines that execute the same code. These crypto "cities" are gentrified now because the largest whales are there moving their huge massive money bags around. The reason that gas fees are so high is because there are so many competing to use the network (and also MEV).
The layer 2 blockchains came to fix this and in theory there will be layer 3 and other layers in the crypto onion that allow applications to have more compute and storage capabilities.
Why should I pay gas fees to allow whales to sustain their fortunes? I don't care if Jeff Bezos takes $1K from an ATM. Fuck crypto whales and big capitalists. I do care about my house, my community, my family, friends, etc. Local surroundings are much more important than global scale concerns. Few global scale problems are important to me. For instance I care about climate change (América is being damaged by it already). We definitely need consensus about this subject. We may need consensus about large scale fishing in the oceans, science research, and some other things. But most of the time we are dealing with local concerns. This is the reason I say blockchains for Layers 2 and above are much more important than Layer 1 blockchains.
This is anarchism 101. It's a hierarchical thing. Layer 1 is at the top and imposes its importance to us. But why is it important? I propose it is supposed to be important because of the locked value. And these locked values often come from big whales fortunes. Furthermore, the reason L1 and L2 are receiving so much funding for development is that the investors want to solidify their capacity to sustain their fortunes, the basic infrastructure to lock their fake values on the internet. And while they invest in it they enable us to build our own infrastructures. These technologies are often open source software and we can fork them, or use them without much effort. We don't even need traditional blockchains because we can already organize with pen and paper and meetings. But we still need ways to interact with other communities. Communities of communities may need to organize with more complex systems. This is where blockchain could offer some really great use cases for social organization.
I'd say we are currently stuck at a point where L1 crypto imposes maximalism and capitalism but at the same time provides basic tools to build L_{n+1} blockchains. Capitalism is building the tools for workers emancipation and organization of communities. This recalls Hegel's dialectics of the master and the slave. Big whales want us to use L_{n+1} blockchains because they know we don't have the capital to spend on expensive L1 but they want us to validate and use their infrastructures. So they invest lots of money on this.
From a leftist perspective, the critiques are fundamental. But shaming developers is not just unnecessarily rude but also dumb because they are the ones that are going to make these tools available to us. To me, as a developer, this is clear. All these idiots on internet being rude because they don't like NFTs are alienating devs, workers, artists. It's clear they are against the whales, the maximalists, the annoying crypto bros, but while acting out they damage the relations with the actual working class that are developing these tools. They are failing to think dialectically to recognize their position with respect to these systems.
So energy waste is related to L1s, to maximalism and to planetary scale consensus. I am against all of those things as well but that doesn't translate into being antiNFT or antiDeFi but rather it translates to putting my development and use efforts into L2 and above, to take into account the antagonisms that are present in these relations.
I think it's difficult to build our posture about these subjects specially for non-technical people and it's the responsibility of technical people to inform and think about these things. Crypto is not going anywhere (despite the bear market) and on the other side what we have is even bigger capitalists/whales, powerful banks, authoritarian capitalist states with armies, socialist states filled with corruption and power abuse. So leftists should think more about how to confront this and build their posture based on their material conditions and the antagonism between these sides. It's not as simple as saying NFTs bad and blocking people with hexagonal profile pictures. That is just childish. Let's rather talk about tactics, about how to use (or not use) these tools for our communities, how to exploit them to expropriate whales tech (socialize means of production and means for organization) and use it for own ends. Critique is fundamental but it is useless if we don't build alternatives. We need praxis and tactics.
Thanks to a few insights I found at twitter I saw at the bottom of this a problem of the dialectics between users and developers. Users are supposed to be the consumers and developers are supposed to be at their service, producing the systems they use. But in this dynamics, developers acquire a lot of power that obligates users to accept the systems and their requisites. Since users can't develop the systems they are only left with bug reporting or recommendations to prefer certain systems or configurations. It looks like most antiNFT people are putting lots of energy to complain to developers and want them to FIX the NFTs and blockchain flaws right away. But the role of users should not be passive and just ranting is not very productive at all.
At the very least users should learn more about the tech and find alternatives. Twitter itself is a flawed piece of tech. It has become a basic infrastructure for us but it's controlled by an elite, it's a technocracy. Sometimes these authorities do things we agree with and sometimes they ban dissent. If communities used, for instance, mastodon, they could decide if they want to install the mastodon NFT upgrade (or downgrade) on their servers. And that's much better than having it imposed by a corporation. Do these users accept their failures as users in the ecosystem by conforming to use twitter as a product and not demanding it is managed collectively by devs and users? Hopefully yes. Just ranting and being rude to devs, artists and other users is awful tactics.
