Note: This Leapfrog episode is a narration of the essay below. The narration is generated using my AI-cloned voice, which doesn’t sound like me (but I’m sure it will if I spend more money and time on it).
The wind swept across Denver as I headed to an Ethereum conference in early spring 2023. Minutes from downtown, where the majestic ice-capped Rockies framed the purple horizon, a retrofitted former Chrysler showroom attracted nearly 50,000 people. The event, called EthDenver, felt more like a carnival than a tech conference. Grunge hacker aesthetics dominated the space: splashy banners, hipster food trucks, pop-up massage booths, and attendees in streetwear merch emblazoned with company names that evoked celestial energy.
Self-sovereignty. Decentralized autonomous organizations. Trustless financial systems. These buzzwords reverberated through EthDenver, an annual gathering focused on Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. It was my first blockchain event, and the enthusiastic proponents of these ideals quickly captivated me—it was a kind of genuine, utopian excitement rare in the profit- and growth-obsessed startup world I was familiar with. So in the following months, I chased down more crypto events, hoping to track whether these promises ever materialized.
A pattern quickly appeared: The themes, or what the crypto community calls “narratives”, discussed among attendees changed every few months; yet I kept seeing the same faces, their conviction undiminished by market volatility, by reality itself. Last summer, “blockchain modularity” was all the rage; this February, it had vanished from people’s consciousness, replaced by new, fervent discussions on “real-world assets.” Each new "story" pumps capital into the ecosystem before being abandoned and reincarnated for the next shiny narrative.
“It’s like going to some sort of church,” one crypto friend confided. “We go to these events once every few months, drink the Kool-Aid, so we can keep going.”
The crypto world's story factory seemed unique in its blatantness—until I ventured into AI. In Silicon Valley's AI gold rush, I found the same pattern: founders crafting grand narratives about the future while insiders quietly acknowledge the gap between promise and reality. Both spaces have perfected a form of consensual delusion where companies churn out stories, monetizing people’s attention rather than informing and inspiring.
Humans tell stories to make sense of the world, to entertain, educate, and influence public opinion. But what happens to truth when storytelling becomes nakedly transactional? When everyone in the room knows they're participating in a fast cycle of collective fiction-building, yet proceeds anyway?
Crypto congregation
The lively sight at EthDenver 2023 was in no way indicative of the billions of dollars just lost to the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, at least to a newcomer like me. That said, an Uber driver recalled the parties from the previous year were way more outlandish, graced by celebrities and politicians alike.
I went to EthDenver to hunt down Chinese entrepreneurs who left home for opportunities. Among them, there were political dissidents, libertarians in self-exile, techno-optimists, and outright scammers. The malleability of blockchain’s characteristics offered something for everyone’s agenda. For the dissidents, censorship-proof ledgers were a bulwark against information control. For the libertarians, complete asset sovereignty offered them newfound economic freedom.
During any big crypto conference, hundreds of unofficial events spring up around the main event. “It’s called decentralization,” a friend said. Organizers pick the coolest spots across host cities worldwide—from a riverside game arcade in Singapore to a boat party on the Bosphorus Strait. Each party expounds on even more niche ideas derived from the main narrative of the time, preaching to an audience who seems more interested in bagging merch than the talks.
Storytelling is an essential tool for anyone peddling an idea or product, but it matters even more in crypto where user demand hardly exists beyond financial speculation and moving money around in a faster, cheaper, sometimes stealthier way. I asked my crypto friends if they believe in the narratives being peddled at those events.
“No, and it doesn’t matter. It matters that people are talking about them,” one of them said.
A parallel story-making apparatus thrives on Twitter/X. Founders invent narratives to pump up token prices. Influencers serve as important amplifiers, mobilizing retail investors to buy in. It’s why the most coveted influencers can charge up to six figures for promoting—or “shilling”—one cryptocurrency campaign. At some point, the token issuer and their inner circle liquidate positions for fat profits before prices inevitably collapse. Elsewhere in the cryptoverse, though, new narratives cropped up, drawing a fresh cohort of short-lived believers.
In the buzzy AI space, there are some striking parallels in how stories are made and consumed.
AI evangelists
The billboards along Highway 101 through the Bay Area offer a reliable indicator of Silicon Valley’s current obsessions (my friend Afra wrote a brilliant piece on this topic). Currently, it’s all about AI agents that can supposedly supercharge your productivity in everything. This hype follows people online. The first thing one sees on Twitter/X these days is likely an influencer endorsing an AI tool. The post usually looks like this:
🚨 This AI agent just replaced my entire team.
⚠️ No sleep, no salary, no complaints.
It scaled outreach 10x, closed deals in my sleep, and even writes better than me.👀 You’re either using AI to win…
…or it’s being used against you.👇 Meet your new unfair advantage:
[link]#AI #Automation #Solopreneur #Startup #GPT
I generated this using ChatGPT with the prompt: “Create a clickbait AI agent Twitter post.”
When LLM-powered applications first started appearing on Twitter/X, I’d study each post closely, excited by how AI was finally delivering on its promise to elevate human productivity and unleash our creativity. Before long, critics snapped that companies often inflated AI’s capabilities, and I started noticing influencers were paid to market AI tools in a flurry of similarly hyperbolic posts:
Startups pay influencers anywhere from $100 to several thousand dollars per post to orchestrate these synchronized product “drops”, creating an illusion of virality. These posts can attract hundreds of thousands of impressions, but their effectiveness remains unclear.
Does such influencer-fabricated hype convert into users? Do users stay on these applications? Or maybe it doesn’t matter, because attention is all you need to unlock myriad other possibilities, and any press is good press? I asked people around.
Genuine comments are rare. Others contended that the influencer hype machine has become unavoidable for fundraising and user acquisition. Even generic, cookie-cutter content, when served up in large volumes, can trigger FOMO among typically discerning individuals. When a product generates enough buzz online, a high-profile investor might notice; if they repost, then fundraising suddenly becomes effortless.
Content quality becomes secondary. What counts is that people see a product trending on their social feeds in an increasingly attention-scarce world. But more often than not, such content shifts the burden of separating signal from noise onto an already overwhelmed audience. As one AI founder quipped on my LinkedIn post, influencer hype “attracts unsuitable users, overburdens underdeveloped products, and generates excessive noise."
Similarly, the search for any cryptocurrency on Twitter/X reveals a constant stream of hype bots with practically identical messages about how their token is “about to print.” Any useful info is lost in the cacophony.
In mass media we still trust
I was surprised that despite all the new channels for direct audience engagement, my crypto and AI friends still desperately seek traditional media coverage. Their reasoning is revealing: while influencer marketing might pump token prices or drive early signups for AI apps, mainstream media confers something more valuable—legitimacy.
"For token prices, we work with influencers—they promote us, the price pumps, and we all get some returns. We don't really need mainstream media for that. But we do need mainstream media to give us some legitimacy," one crypto founder admitted to me.
This paradox exposes a fascinating tension: While alternative media channels offer immediate reach, they don't provide the institutional trust that traditional outlets have built over decades. This remains true in business, even as politics has evolved differently, with groups increasingly distrusting mainstream media.
Perhaps the most disorienting aspect of our current moment is the acceleration of narrative cycles. Ideas that once might take years to rise and fall now complete their lifecycle in months or even weeks. Adding on top of that, narratives are manufactured at scale, distributed through paid channels, and optimized for engagement rather than truth.
For discerning observers and thoughtful founders alike, the path forward may require a disciplined disengagement from the narrative treadmill. Not every story deserves your attention; not every trend requires your participation. Authority itself becomes scarce and even more valuable.
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