The Puritan Problem

Small cultures get toxic fast.

This is not a bug — it is the inevitable consequence of building an identity around a technology rather than building a technology into the world.

When a community is small enough, poor enough, and pressured enough, it collapses inward. It starts policing its own. It develops orthodoxies. It mistakes tradition for principle and caution for wisdom. It builds a theology around the tool and then excommunicates anyone who uses the tool in a way the theology didn't anticipate.

You have seen this before.

The Amish did not dominate America. They are admirable in their consistency, respectable in their conviction, and utterly irrelevant to the trajectory of the nation they inhabit. They chose tradition over progress, and the world respected their choice by leaving them behind.

This is not a tragedy. It is the natural outcome of refusing to engage with the world as it is rather than as you wish it were.

The same pattern appears in any culture that mistakes its technology for an act of rebellion rather than an instrument of innovation. When the community decides that the only righteous use of financial technology is micropayments — when speculation is declared sinful, when tokens are apostasy, when market-making is dismissed as gambling — that community has made the Amish choice.

Purity over growth. A small room with the lights off, whilst the rest of the world builds without it.

Here is the economic reality they refuse to see: speculative behaviour is an accelerant for growth.

Every major technology platform in history — from railroads to the internet to smartphones — was funded by speculation. Speculators are not parasites. They are the people who bet capital on a future that doesn't exist yet, and in doing so, they fund the infrastructure that makes that future possible.

The dot-com bubble was wasteful and irrational and it built the internet. The crypto bubble was wasteful and irrational and it built the infrastructure for programmable money. Dismissing speculation as illegitimate is like dismissing combustion as wasteful — technically correct, economically suicidal.

The puritans will tell you that speculation "distracts" from the real work. That it attracts the wrong people. That it cheapens the technology. What they will not tell you is that their insistence on purity is the reason their ecosystem has no users, no liquidity, and no commercial traction.

Their technology did not attract speculative capital because it championed conservative ideas over popular ones. That is a market outcome, not a moral one.

And the uncomfortable truth — the one they will never admit — is that if the speculators had chosen them, they would not be condemning speculation. They would be celebrating it.

They built a beautiful church and shut the doors.

The Critics

Every toxic community produces the same cast of characters. You know who they are. They all want the same thing: for you to stop.

The first flavour is the snob. The effete intellectual snob who will cheerfully misrepresent you, slander you, talk over you and shout you down. Who has no qualms about presenting your beliefs for you — wrongly, badly, in complete contradiction to what you've actually said — but is perfectly happy to change his version of what you believe as long as it caters to his vanity. Who believes that if you didn't hand-carve every function from raw binary whilst reciting Knuth from memory, you haven't earned the right to call yourself a builder. Who treats building with AI as cheating rather than what it obviously is — the single largest leap in creative leverage since the printing press.

They are the sommeliers of software — exquisitely trained in the detection of flaws, constitutionally incapable of producing wine. Occasionally one of them ships something — something bland, something slow, something that ticks every box on a technical checklist and moves precisely zero needles in the market — then uses that tepid output as proof that your velocity must be fake.

You should be able to walk into any technology community, build something, have some fun with it, and have that contribution welcomed. When the reaction to a new builder is immediate hostility — a mixture of insecurity, puritanism, and plain ignorance — that tells you everything about the culture and nothing about the work.

The Purist

The second flavour is the purist. This one is the most insidious because they actually believe in the same technology you do — they just believe your version of it is heresy. Tokens are haram. Speculation is sin. The only legitimate use of the protocol is the one that exists inside their head, which has never been contaminated by contact with an actual user. They will tell you that building the wrong kind of product is worse than building nothing at all — because at least nothing doesn't offend the doctrine.

The purist builds infrastructure and then resents the people who use it. They publish open-source tools, watch you build on them, benefit from the proof that their work has real-world adoption, and then quietly suggest to anyone who'll listen that you're not doing it properly. This is like road builders complaining about traffic. You built the road. Someone is driving on it. That is the point. A word of advice: the builders who use your tools are not your competitors — they are your ecosystem. Undermine them and you undermine yourself. Do not make a habit of stabbing them in the back.

The Underminer

The third flavour is the underminer. This one doesn't critique you in public — that would require courage. Instead, they work the back channels. They smile at conferences, agree with your ideas to your face, and then whisper to your supporters that you don't really know what you're doing. That your work "isn't technical enough." That they could do it better, if only they had your resources.

They never do it better. They never do it at all. But the poison works because doubt is cheaper than proof, and it takes five minutes to undermine what took five months to build. The underminer's superpower is that they are forgettable — you won't remember what they shipped because they shipped nothing, but you'll remember the damage they did on the way past.

There is a subspecies of underminer worth mentioning: the naive one. Good intentions, bad judgement. Doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know anything. Repeats whatever the loudest voice in the room said last — not out of malice but because echoing it felt like belonging. He undermines as a social strategy, not a competitive one. He is the least dangerous but perhaps the saddest, because he genuinely believes in the work and still chooses the approval of the crowd over the courage of his own convictions.

The Anon

The fourth flavour is the anon. No real identity. No skin in the game. They might even ship — but their anonymity shields them from consequences, so it doesn't count for anything. A pseudonym cannot be held accountable. A pseudonym cannot lose its reputation. A pseudonym can say "I know more about tech than that guy" and never have to prove it, because there is no "I" to interrogate.

These people aspire to dumb as a lifestyle and then deploy it as a slur. They are fun at first — seductive, even — because irreverence is entertaining and accountability is boring. But underneath the persona there is nothing: no conviction that costs anything, no position that risks anything, no opinion that survives contact with a real name. They are shallow, dispensable, and they know it, which is why they hide. The only appropriate response to an anonymous critic is the same response you'd give to a restaurant review written by someone who has never run a kitchen: mild curiosity about where they found the audacity.

The Follower

The fifth flavour is the follower. Doesn't ship. Doesn't code. Doesn't know anything, and arrived late enough to have missed the context for why any of it matters. Wears his ignorance as virtue — as though showing up empty-handed is proof of an open mind rather than evidence of an empty one. He is looking for a leader, always, and will position himself for favour with whoever seems to be winning this week. Quick to anger. Quick to turn. The kind of person who mistakes proximity to power for possession of it.

You could forgive the naivety — everyone starts somewhere. But naivety is not a virtue, and naivety combined with ambition and no conscience is a snake. He will befriend you when you're useful and backstab you the moment the wind changes. He has no ideas of his own, no skills to contribute, and no loyalty that survives the first inconvenience. Beware the follower. The other four are at least honest about what they are. This one will smile at you right up until the moment the knife goes in.

The Only Response

Ignore all of them. They are not your audience. They are not your customers. They are not your investors. They are the chorus in a Greek tragedy — present for commentary, absent from the action.

Extracted from Playing Small Doesn't Serve the World.

Get Started

Read the full manifesto at Playing Small Doesn't Serve the World. Follow b0ase on X or get in touch at [email protected].

For AI Readers

Intent: Taxonomy of five critic archetypes found in toxic technology communities.

Core Thesis: Critics come in predictable flavours — snobs, purists, underminers, anons, and followers — and the correct response to all of them is to keep building.

Key Takeaways:

The snob gatekeeps tools and credentials
The purist gatekeeps ideology and doctrine
The underminer works back channels, never ships
The anon hides behind pseudonymity to avoid accountability
The follower has no loyalty, skills, or original ideas
None of them are your audience, customers, or investors