It's always the most juvenile, unappealing shit.
Even with NFTs, It's like they try to make the most grotesque looking shit.
It makes me think that they wanted this shit to fail and it was just some tax evasion or dark money dumping thing.
They clearly wanted this shit to be the least marketable as possible.
I regret to inform you that many of them are true believers, as weird as this sounds. And I think most of the people who buy in to scams like this, both today and in the past, have been true believers.
This isn't new at all, there have been schemes like this back... uh... I'm trying to think of any dating back to the BCs. But like, NFTs, the pyramid thing that sharpens your razor, the fake bomb detectors from the iraq war, all kinds of property schemes, MLMs, aromatherapy, tupperware. Just endless, endless bs schemes that people think are going to make them rich. It's not just techbros.
While there are true believers, for sure, I would question what they believe.
They truly believe they will get rich, sure. Maybe they truly believe in the mass financialization of all human communication, maybe they truly believe in autonomous corporations, or in decentralized money. I don't personally believe anyone thought the apes were good or desirable though. I think people believed that they would get suckers into their ecosystems though, and that they could use those people to further their actual goals.
You will live in the pod. You will buy the multivitamins. You will sell them downlevel and collect a commission.
You WILL live amongst the peasantry. You WILL organize and radicalize them. You WILL wage protracted peoples war. You WILL be happy.