I receive email newsletters from Coinbase, and in their most recent missive they detailed the many Web2 giants moving towards Web3. Instagram, Airbnb and Spotify are moving towards application of the tech. I read about the newest offering from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a crypto coin called ApeCoin, which pushes their company's valuation to over 4 billion with 450 million new investment from Andreesen Horowitz.

Why does this matter, why am I posting it here?

Web3 enables anonymity among holders of vast wealth like never before. It rewards people who are early adopters. I see more and more of the creative talent and minds of our country focused on making digital worlds that are ever more commodified.

This newsletter shared that some rank and file developers for Web3 technologies are pulling as high as 750k salaries. The vast gap between these people and the average person is going to necessarily be so huge that I doubt they will be able to even relate to us poor proles who have to live in the real world.

Maybe it has always been this way, but I just feel like more and more that we're living in a Silicon Gilded Age - the majority of the money and creative problem solvers are desperately trying to figure out how to charge people for jpgs while the minimum wage stays stagnant and it's purchasing power continues to decline to almost nothing.

How can so many people be wage slaves while so much energy is spent on building a world where we can all be surveilled and distracted even more effectively?

I'm just really feeling down about it all.