Crypto's Deviance
Adam Mastroianni's decline of deviance thesis argues society has become increasingly risk-averse and homogeneous - teens drink less, adults commit fewer crimes, culture stagnates, and architecture converges on minimalist sameness. His explanation: life has become so safe and valuable that we've adopted "slow life strategies," avoiding anything that might disrupt our comfortable existence.
The cryptocurrency space perfectly illustrates this pattern's divergence. Bitcoin and Ethereum represent two fundamentally different responses to the decline of deviance.
Bitcoin is embracing the decline. What started as cypherpunk rebellion has crystallized into orthodoxy. The community has developed rigid narratives around "digital gold", "21 million", and "hodling". The culture demands conformity - if you question the laser eyes consensus, you're dismissed as not understanding Bitcoin. It's creating exactly the kind of monoculture Mastroianni describes: everyone thinking the same thoughts, using the same language, following the same playbook. Bitcoin has become institutionalized deviance that's no longer actually deviant.
Ethereum, meanwhile, exemplifies the wild deviance Mastroianni says we're losing. DeFi Summer was pure chaos - a completely unregulated market where anyone could launch anything. Sure, most projects were garbage or outright scams. But that's the point. Real deviance means tolerating the bad weird along with the good weird. You had teenagers creating protocols moving billions of dollars. Anonymous developers shipping code that banks couldn't imagine. Constant experimentation with new mechanisms, new models, new possibilities.
The Ethereum ecosystem remains genuinely strange. Every few months there's a completely new category of thing that didn't exist before - DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, restaking, RWA tokenization, AI agents, prediction markets. The community actively debates fundamental changes. Hard forks happen. People take real risks.
This connects to Mastroianni's insight about why deviance has declined: we have too much to lose. Bitcoin's institutional adoption has given it something precious to protect, so it's become conservative. Ethereum's culture, for better or worse, maintains the hacker ethos of "move fast and break things" - which is only possible if you're willing to risk breaking everything you've built.
The question is whether crypto can sustain genuine deviance or whether, like everything else Mastroianni documents, it will inevitably converge on safe, boring consensus. Bitcoin suggests the latter. Ethereum suggests it's still possible to keep the weird alive - if you're willing to accept the chaos that comes with it.
The Decline of Deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
