Cameo CEO favorably compares Web3 boom to the colonization of the Americas

Last Thursday to $400 million round, the venture capital firm M13 held an invite-only schmoozing opportunity in the former offices of Musical.ly, opening with a introductory chat on “the future of crypto, the decentralized web, and creators.” Curiously, one of the guests was Cameo’s Steven Galanis who, according to audio provided to Engadget by an attendee, took the opportunity to share a metaphor he apparently has deployed before: that the rampant speculation around Web3 is akin to the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. To be clear, he seems to think of both as good things.

Cameo, the service that hit around $300,000 at the time. He steered Cameo toward minting its own set of NFTs (called “Cameo Pass”) often according to the Gotham Center’s Richard Howe “the extant evidence for the Dutch purchase of Manhattan is scant, indirect and circumstantial.” 

While a were even the tribe primarily occupying Manhattan at the time.

Whatever the case, this “investment” was short-lived, and New Amsterdam was “taken easily by the British,” according to Fowler, in 1664, less than 20 years after the rights were supposedly sold for a song. Let’s not even get into how the metaphor fails on a structural level in that Web3 isn’t a valuable resource simply awaiting discovery and exploitation. Its illusion of riches shares more in common with El Dorado than the “New World.”

It might appear unfair to expect Galanis to have studied history, rather than basing offensive flights of fancy on colonialist myths. Then again, history was the man’s area of study at Duke. Engadget made several attempts to contact Cameo to allow Galanis to explain precisely what he might have meant by this analogy, and have yet to hear back. “Trying to apply 21st [century] criteria to ages past should be done with great care,” professor Fowler wrote, “[Galanis] may have something to say, but it is hard to dig through the rhetoric to get to his point, if he has any.”

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