You're at dinner. A real dinner, with plates and humans and a candle that cost someone $42 at Crate & Barrel. The conversation is alive — someone just told a genuinely funny story about their landlord. People are laughing. The risotto is landing. And then your friend, the one who pivoted from crypto Twitter to AI Twitter sometime around March 2024, leans forward and says, "The thing about RAG is—"

The table dies. Not dramatically. Just a slow, arterial bleed of social energy as he explains retrieval-augmented generation to people who were, moments ago, having a good time. You've seen this before. You saw it in 2021, except back then it was "the thing about L2 rollups" and the risotto was a $74 omakase someone paid for in ETH.

The vibe shift happened while you were shipping.

The Seven Stages of Crypto-Brainification (AI Remix)

If you were online between 2020 and 2023, you watched an entire generation of otherwise normal people undergo a psychological metamorphosis that turned them from "person with interests" into "person whose only interest is blockchain." It happened in stages. It was predictable. It was, in its way, beautiful — like watching a nature documentary about a parasitic fungus taking over an ant's nervous system, except the fungus was Solana and the ant had a podcast.

The AI community is now speedrunning the exact same arc, and because nobody learns from anything, we get to watch it happen again in real time. Here are the stages. You're in at least three of them. You'll deny all of them.

Stage 1: Genuine Curiosity

This stage is beautiful and pure and lasts about eleven days. You try ChatGPT. It writes you a poem. The poem is mid, but the fact that it wrote a poem at all makes you feel something. You show your partner. You show your mom. You use it to draft an email and feel like you're getting away with something. This is the Garden of Eden phase. You still have other hobbies. You still talk about movies at dinner.

The serpent in this garden is your Twitter timeline, and it's already loading.

Stage 2: Evangelism

You start telling people who didn't ask. Uber drivers. Your barber. Your therapist, who is now hearing about function calling instead of your relationship with your father. Every conversation becomes a funnel to the same destination: "Have you tried using AI for that?" Someone mentions they're planning a trip to Portugal. You suggest they use Claude to build an itinerary. They were just making conversation. You were just making it weird.

The crypto equivalent was telling people to "look into Bitcoin" at Thanksgiving. The AI equivalent is offering to "automate that for you" when someone describes a task they enjoy doing manually. Both share the same fundamental misread: confusing your enthusiasm for a gift you're giving other people.

Stage 3: Identity Replacement

This is where the ice gets thin. Your Twitter bio changes. Your LinkedIn updates. Where once it said "product designer / dad / trail runner" it now says "building with AI" or, God help us, "AI-native." You've replaced a personality with a positioning statement.

Remember laser eyes? Remember ".eth"? We now have "🤖" in display names and "building in public" as a personality trait. The specifics change. The underlying dynamic — using a technology as a substitute for having a self — is identical. You are not your tech stack. You are not your tech stack. You are not your tech stack.

Stage 4: "Few Understand"

Ah. Here we are. The main event.

The crypto version was explicit: people would literally tweet "few understand" as a complete thought, a koan for finance bros, a way of saying "I am in the know and you are not" while maintaining plausible deniability that they were saying anything at all. It was the most efficient smugness delivery mechanism ever invented.

The AI version is subtler, which makes it worse. It sounds like: "Most people are still using AI like a search engine." It sounds like: "If you're not building agents, you're going to be left behind." It sounds like: "I just don't think most people realize what's about to happen." The tone is concern. The subtext is contempt. The function is identical: drawing a border between the elect and the normies, and making sure everyone knows which side of the line you're on.

The cruelest irony is that "few understand" was almost always wrong in crypto — the tech mostly didn't work, and the people who "understood" were frequently holding bags. In AI, the tech does work, which means the smug people are occasionally right, which makes them exponentially more insufferable. Being correct is the worst thing that can happen to someone who was already annoying.

Stage 5: The Conference Circuit as Lifestyle

You now attend events the way other people attend church: regularly, ritualistically, and with a wardrobe you only wear in that context. Your carry-on is perpetually packed. You have opinions about airport lounges. You've said "great to connect IRL" more times this quarter than you've said "I love you."

You didn't go to San Francisco. You went to a venue in San Francisco, talked to the same forty people you talk to online, ate a boxed lunch that cost someone $120 per head to cater, and flew home. You've seen less of the city than someone who watched a YouTube travel vlog. But you were "in the room," and being in the room is the point — not because of what happens in the room, but because of what you can signal about having been in it.

Crypto had Consensus and ETHDenver. AI has all of them. Every week. The content is different. The lanyard energy is eternal.

Stage 6: The Merch Phase

I don't want to dwell on this because it makes me sad, but: you own clothing that references a foundation model. There is, somewhere in your apartment, a tote bag that says something about tokens. This is the "HODL" hat of our era, and you will look back on it with the same energy that people look back on their "Make Ethereum Great Again" caps — which is to say, you won't look back on it at all, because you will have burned the evidence.

Stage 7: Full Dissociation from Pre-AI Personality

The final stage. People who knew you in 2022 genuinely can't find you anymore — not because you've gone somewhere, but because the person they knew has been fully overwritten. Your conversations are about inference costs. Your jokes are about hallucinations. Your dating profile says "building the future" where it used to say "likes hiking and The Sopranos." You still like hiking and The Sopranos. You just can't access those files anymore. They've been moved to cold storage to make room for opinions about MoE architectures.

You've become what the crypto people became: someone who can only talk about one thing, at every dinner, at every party, in every DM, until the people who loved you before the obsession start quietly adjusting their invite lists.

The Tragic Part

Here's what makes this worse than the crypto version, and I mean genuinely worse: the tech is good this time.

Crypto bros had an excuse. The thing they were building their identities around was, in many cases, vaporware. The DAOs didn't govern. The DeFi yields were Ponzi math in a trench coat. The NFT art was money laundering wearing a beret. When the crash came, they could tell themselves that the idea was right even if the execution was fake. They were wrong about something, which is at least an honest way to lose your personality.

AI bros don't have that excuse. The technology works. It's genuinely transformative. And knowing that, choosing to make it your entire identity anyway — choosing the tribalism, the smugness, the "few understand," the conference-circuit-as-personality — is not a mistake. It's a decision. You had something real, and instead of letting it be one interesting part of a complete human life, you let it eat everything else.

That's not a grift. It's a tragedy. The kind where the protagonist has every advantage and still ends up alone at a hotel bar, explaining embeddings to a bartender who does not, in fact, understand — and shouldn't have to.

The funniest part? You're going to share this post. You're going to say "lmao" and tag someone and add a comment like "this is so real." And you will believe, with your whole chest, that it's about someone else.

Few understand.

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