"I want to start this post off by stating that I have very little interest in freakishly expensive cartoon animal JPEGs, private Discord servers, or hexagon profile photos. When people think of web3, or look at what the “people in web3” are doing, outside of direct scams this is generally what they see. It looks as though the highest achievement of this third web is that the rich and famous have been given a new way to show everyone how disconnected they are from reality. And they are. I don’t have a lot of explanations for it, and while I too got caught up and enamored with expensive cartoons during the peak of the mania, I have no desire to rationalize any of it away. Instead, for this post, I want to look beyond it."