“It's the longing for community, actual community,” Ben McKenzie told a WIRED@Night event, arguing that loneliness helps explain why people are drawn to cryptocurrency.
At the event
Actor-director Ben McKenzie, now a prominent critic of cryptocurrency, made the case at a WIRED@Night session on 16 April at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn. He appeared with WIRED senior correspondent Andy Greenberg to discuss his book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud and his documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. The event drew roughly 100 people and covered scenes from both works and McKenzie's travels to crypto hubs such as El Salvador.
The loneliness thesis
McKenzie used a concise phrase to describe one of crypto's attractions: "It's the longing for community, actual community." He said online networks and chat rooms around tokens do more than trade — they provide belonging.
He argued the social architecture of crypto can mirror gambling dynamics. Where traditional gambling mixes risk, ritual and social contact, parts of the crypto ecosystem can combine all three, creating an online arena that fills social needs while distributing financial risk.
How that matters for finance
When investors treat crypto purely as an asset class, they focus on volatility, liquidity and returns. McKenzie's point pushes the debate in another direction: if some demand is social rather than strictly financial, market signals may misread the drivers of price moves.
Buying pressure can stem from community dynamics as well as fundamentals. That matters for portfolio managers and risk officers, who typically model cash flows and correlations but not social forces; those forces can translate into buying frenzies and sustained narratives that keep prices elevated long after the economic story has faded.
Communities form around tokens, platforms and prominent figures; those clusters can amplify sentiment and smooth over doubts. In practice, retail demand can remain strong even when a token's underlying use case is weak, which helps explain the durability of certain crypto narratives.
Gambling, pandemic and the online turn
McKenzie traced part of crypto's mainstreaming to the Covid-19 pandemic, saying the technology's rapid rise coincided with a period when people spent more time online and sought new forms of interaction. For some, crypto offered excitement; for others, group identity.
Seen this way, the boom in retail participation during the pandemic was not just spare cash and stimulus but also a social phenomenon. People who felt cut off from their usual networks turned to online communities for company; crypto channels, trading groups and token fan clubs provided a place to trade ideas and assert membership. McKenzie's analogy to gambling highlights that crypto can provide ritual, risk and social connection simultaneously.
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“It's the longing for community, actual community,” Ben McKenzie said — a reminder that crypto demand can be driven as much by social ties as by economics.
This article was created with AI assistance.
