Pokémon gotta catch em all
Did you know that after Mario, Pokémon is the best ever selling game in the world and that as recently as in 2017, the Pokémon Trading Card Game had an 82% share of Europe’s strategic card game market. Why is this game still so popular 30 + years since its original release? Does it have something to do with humans innate propensity to collect things?
Humans have collected things since the dawn of time. Carl Jung argued our desire to collect is a genetic predisposition which has its roots from our hunter gatherer ancestors. Our most capable forefathers who were best able to hunt and survive would live on and pass these traits through generations. Evolutionary theorists suggest that mans ability to collect things was a signalling mechanism to attract future mates.
So why am talking about Pokémon and divulging the psychological theories for why humans innately collect things?
Well, something happened in 2021 in crypto that those of us deep in the space the last few years were probably quite surprised about. It wasn’t a better, more inclusive financial system that put crypto on the radar but instead digital JPEGs. Right click copy pasters in max pain as 2D pixels on the blockchain exchanged hands for millions of dollars. But why did pictures of Apes and Punks resonate with normies more than any other use case?
Digital status = IRL status?
Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive?
The sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the human desire to acquire goods and services as public displays of power and status.
The extent to which you care about your standing in society varies person to person. The most confident among you will likely postulate you care not what others think of you or whether you have a fancy job or a nice car but I’m afraid to tell you that you do care. How do I know this about you? well, more specifically, Professor Cameron Anderson says you care based on a 2015 paper of hundreds of studies based on the topic over 70 years. Anderson defined status as comprising three components:
- Respect or admiration
- Voluntary deference by others
- Social value
His findings showed that people with low status in society, their peer group etc… are at higher risk of depression, anxiety and even cardiovascular disease. Even if you don’t realise it, our aversion to low status drives us towards higher status.
Look across crypto Twitter and you’re unlikely to see 10% or more of human profile pictures. Instead you will see people flaunting their crypto status through their use of a CryptoPunk or a Bored Ape. Many crypto folk haven’t set their profile pictures to several hundred thousand dollar NFTs as ostentatious displays of wealth but instead as a symbol of their crypto nativeness. Whether knowingly or not, others will look up to these people as high status individuals with the logic that this person is a crypto OG and therefore what they say and do has high standing within the community.
As our digital identities become ever more intertwined with our physical ones, it stands to reason that our status within the digital world becomes ever more important — maybe more so than our physical ones.
The need for social belonging
Boomers won’t believe it but what it means to be social is no longer confined to face to face interactions within the meatspace. Even now, people of all ages spend a majority of time on their phones, laptops etc… engaging with others in a digital format. I would argue this is already the early signs of the Metaverse. As our identities, work and social lives continue to blur between the physical and digital boundaries, what it means to develop human connection is also shifting. As we saw with covid lockdowns and mental health, pure digital interaction likely isn’t the solution but that’s a topic for another conversation. However, what we must appreciate is that many digital anons whose name, gender, sex, race etc… we do not know yet many of us call friends. Boomers in disbelief.
However, despite an ever changing world, what makes us humans hasn’t changed for many years and our yearning for social acceptance and belonging is as strong as ever. In fact if you read the book ‘Social’ by Social Psychologist Mathew Lieberman, our need to connect is as fundamental as our need for food and water. He goes as far to say that when we experience social pain — a snub, a cruel word — the feeling is as real as physical pain.
By thinking of the above in context, it makes sense that we see such strength in crypto native communities that blend together this new digital and physical world with communities such as Friends With Benefits (FWB) and the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). Through owning their native token or NFT, users can gain entry into exclusive online conversations through discord and in real life parties and events globally. Again if we use Twitter as an example, BAYC profile pictures are common place and you will often see people follow other BAYC twitter users simply because they are part of the same community. Social belonging and community transported online in evidence.
Reflection of self
How I dress, my hairstyle, my instagram profile all tell a story of who I am or more likely, how I want others to see me. I recently changed my LinkedIn profile picture to a Pudgy Penguin (see image at the beginning) in some form of protest against the cringeworthy cesspit that is LinkedIn. Why did I do that? well on a subconscious level its a form of protest against the old system but more specifically it’s my allegiance to crypto and web 3.0. Our possessions, traditionally physically but more increasingly digitally (those who have spent thousands on in game items in fortnite etc… will understand) reflect how we want people to see us. A paper titled ‘Possessions and the extended self’ by Russell Belk explains how Ruthie Segev at Jerusalem College of Technology found evidence that selecting and buying gifts for friends helps adolescents achieve a sense of identity independent from their parents. Further, research conducted in the 1980s made the finding that the more young men saw their cars as extensions of themselves, the more trouble they took to wash, wax and care for them.
It makes sense then that as we spend more time online, what it means to express ourselves, becomes ever more important in a digital context as it previously has been in a physical context. With NFTs, we have the ability to own our digital items for the first time ever. Will the digital flex become more important to zoomers than the physical one? among a sub crowd of early enthusiasts, it already has.
The above paragraphs are just some New Year holiday musings about why NFTs might have resonated with normies backed up by some much smarter academics than myself. Let me know your thoughts and remember — WAGMI, let’s smash 2022.
