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(Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)

We landed in Mandalay, departed the airport, and began our Myanmar adventure. It was December 2012, and apart from a few wide-eyed tourists, the airport and immediate vicinity felt empty — like a perfect Alfred Hitchcock movie setup.

After clearing immigration, we left a gleaming but empty airport, jumped into a vehicle from the 1980’s, and drove along a deserted highway. The taxi reminded me of my father’s car, which my brother and I used to refer to as the “bye-bye” car (because it might break down at any moment). It was a certified hooptie. We shared the four-lane expressway with a dude driving an ox-cart. Other than that, it was mid-day during the workweek and there wasn’t a soul to be seen as we entered the city.

I was with my bestie — my wannabe K-pop star / NBA player hedge fund bro friend. The last time he drove to the hoop, he was steering his SUV to the Staples Centre. He decided to spend his mandatory two-week leave on a South-East Asia adventure with me. During the first two weeks of December 2012, we hit Jakarta, Bali, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Myanmar (Mandalay, Inle Lake, Bagan, and Yangon), and finished the trip driving across Sri Lanka.

My boy is real good with the internet, and did a lot of research on how to travel within Myanmar. A decade ago, many things we consider almost basic human rights did not exist. There was no mobile phone service, barely any internet connectivity, and no ATMs. They only accepted physical USD, but one had to be careful — as there were certain serial numbers that were not accepted. Wrinkled or torn notes weren’t accepted either — so we smushed all of our cash inside books so that the bills were flat and crisp.

Once you got over the lack of modern connectivity and financial services, what remained was a country bursting with potential, beautiful temples, and a welcoming populace. We hit a new city every day in order to cover as much of the country as possible in our short time there. We spent our last few days in Yangon, the commercial capital of the country. During the British colonial era, the city — which used to be called Rangoon — was one of their most prosperous colonies.

Situated between India, Thailand, and China, and with a deep-water port emptying out into the Andaman Sea, Myanmar possesses significant geostrategic value. The country is also rich in precious stones (e.g., rubies and jade), natural resources (they have vast untapped natural gas and oil reserves), and a large, young population (perfect for making knick-knacks to be sold on Amazon in exchange for dirt cheap wages). However, for various reasons, these natural blessings are not fully utilised, and the country was living decades in the past.

Wherever you are in the world, cultural and linguistic artifacts of the dominant empire permeate your existence. December in Yangon was no different. One of the most surprising aspects was the amount of Christmas decorations in and around Yangon. Myanmar is a Buddhist majority country, with a large Muslim minority. It is not a culture or country built upon Judeo-Christian values, nor is it so integrated into the global economy that a secular consumer holiday like Christmas would be assumed to be practiced.

Despite all of these factors, I heard all the classic Christmas tunes. I will always love you, Mariah! I saw snowmen in a tropical dusty city, jingle bells ringing, and Santa hats. The hostesses at many bars wore drab red and white garb to display their affiliation with this global year-ending ritual.

The Judeo-Christian liberal democratic empire has ignored Myanmar, but people there still absorbed some of its most important cultural aspects. Every society practices rituals and holds festivals to celebrate the death of one year and the rebirth of another. What a given population practices says many things about who really rules the roost.

When a people share similar cultural values, they share assumed beliefs and practices that need not be directly espoused. Winning the hearts and minds of the people is more important than your ability to project kinetic power. Occupying foreign territory without the defeated people accepting the victor’s culture can become quite the expensive boondoggle.

Every organisational structure, be it a nation state, religion, or networked state, needs to acquire and retain users. The transmission mechanism for the virus of belonging is culture and language. It is much easier to retain users into your value system if they share the same assumed beliefs as the culture looking to absorb them. Therefore, as we attempt to completely re-organise the world using stateless currencies and decentralised public blockchain permissioned networks, the culture of those networks will be just as important as the price of the coin and quality of the tech.

The first thing any coloniser does is destroy the oppressed populace’s connection to their heritage. They remove their traditional clothing, change their names, and eradicate their language. Then, they ensure the populace is brought up wearing “appropriate” clothing, using the “right” speech, and believing in the “real” god(s).

Everything comes from something. Crypto is a reaction against a fiat currency-driven, debt-based financial system and a centralised, top-down exclusive nation-state. It didn’t come out of the box with its own language and culture, but it has already begun developing its own version that is distinctly different from what it claims to rail against.

As many in the world celebrate the secular holiday using the symbols of an old fat white man riding down from the North Pole in a magical sleigh to bequeath presents to deserving children, let us think about how the crypto culture has evolved and the areas where we need fresh thinking to clearly break from the thing we wish to defeat.

Crypto Memes

Lest you doubt the power of memes, look no further than Elon Musk. Tesla as a company should be a big phat zero, but Elon is one the best meme artists this world has ever seen. Someone remarked to me that he has a team that only cranks out dank memes. Elon is worth hundreds of billions of USD because his memes are so on point.

Like a virus, memes infect the host’s mind with a narrative that is easy to intuitively understand and pass onto the next victim. The delivery mechanism of social media allows the meme to infect many hosts quickly.