Crypto feels like a rave in the 1990s | Opinion

For many people in the crypto world, the attraction is difficult to explain in purely rational terms. It is not only about money, and it is not simply about technology. The appeal often feels emotional, even intuitive, as though something familiar has resurfaced in a new form.

That sense of familiarity is not accidental. Crypto occupies a cultural position that closely resembles the role rave played in the late twentieth century. Both emerged not as straightforward reactions to scarcity or innovation, but as responses to deeper structural unease.

Systems in retreat

In the 1990s, rave took root in the physical remnants of industrial society. Abandoned factories, warehouses, and peripheral spaces became temporary gathering points for people navigating the aftershocks of deindustrialisation. These were places left behind by the prevailing economic order.

In the 2020s, crypto has emerged in a different kind of vacancy. It occupies a credibility gap created by eroding trust in monetary systems, increasingly abstract finance, and institutions that feel distant from everyday experience. Where traditional systems retreat or lose legitimacy, alternative ones begin to form.

In both cases, the movement did not appear at the centre of power, but at its edges.

Rave and crypto operate in different domains, yet their structures bear striking similarities. Rave existed in physical space, organised around shared presence. Crypto exists in a distributed digital space, coordinated through networks rather than locations. Rave pushed against rigid labour structures and limited social mobility. Crypto challenges monetary intermediaries, surveillance, and the concentration of financial control.

Information spread differently, but followed the same logic. Rave relied on pirate radio, flyers, and word-of-mouth. Crypto spreads through messaging platforms, online forums, and social networks. The tools changed, but the reliance on informal channels remained.

The values diverged in language but not in impulse. Rave articulated its ethics through ideas like peace, love, unity, and respect. Crypto expresses its scepticism more technically, through principles such as verification over trust. One was sensory and embodied. The other is abstract and computational. Both reflected a desire to reorganise participation on new terms.

The return of structural anxiety

The social conditions that gave rise to rave did not disappear. They resurfaced in different forms.

Today’s world appears technologically advanced, yet increasingly unstable beneath the surface. Economic uncertainty has become normalised. Traditional career paths feel fragile. Home ownership drifts further out of reach. Confidence in institutions continues to erode.

At the same time, technological change accelerates faster than social systems can absorb. The internet transformed communication. Blockchain reconfigured the concept of value. Artificial intelligence is now reshaping labour itself. Progress is visible everywhere. Security is not.

This combination of rapid technological advancement and persistent social anxiety has historically created fertile ground for alternative systems. Crypto emerged within precisely this environment.

One of the defining features of early rave culture was the temporary suspension of identity. On the dance floor, markers such as education, income, and social background lost their immediate relevance. Participation mattered more than credentials.

A similar dynamic appears in crypto. Pseudonymous identities and avatar-based culture reduce the weight of traditional status signals. Contribution, activity, and presence often matter more than formal background. In both cases, identity becomes something enacted rather than assigned.

Crypto as a cultural response

Crypto is often described primarily as a financial innovation. Yet its deeper significance is cultural.

Like early rave, it offers an alternative framework for participation, a parallel system operating alongside established structures. Many people did not enter crypto only because existing systems were inefficient. They were drawn in because those systems increasingly felt inaccessible, opaque, or misaligned with their lived realities.

Crypto did not promise certainty. It promised participation.

Early rave culture was decentralized, not because it sought to challenge authority, but because there was no authority to appeal to. There were no institutions granting legitimacy, no central organisers, and no formal permissions.

Crypto follows a similar pattern. Its decentralization is less an ideological stance than a practical response to the absence of trusted intermediaries. Both systems grew because they allowed participation without prior approval. That openness mattered more than any declared philosophy. 

In both rave and crypto, community emerged before utility. Early ravers did not gather with a clear vision of scale, monetization, or long-term outcomes. Early crypto participants similarly engaged without fully understanding what the system might become. People stayed because they recognized one another, shared a sense of being early or misaligned with the mainstream, and found meaning in collective experimentation.

Value followed participation, not the other way around.

Participation as identity

In mainstream systems, identity is often conferred through roles and metrics. In rave and crypto, identity is shaped through action. You show up. You contribute. You participate.

There is no audience without participants, and no network without active nodes. This is why both cultures generate intense loyalty, even when they appear chaotic, inefficient, or difficult to explain from the outside.

Neither rave nor crypto offers freedom in the abstract. They offer something more practical: the freedom to organise, to experiment, and to fail without permission.

They tend to attract those who do not fit neatly into existing categories. Builders, outsiders, and people who sense that the system functions, just not for them.

As with rave, crypto eventually entered a phase of commercialisation. Capital flowed in. Scale increased. Costs rose. Narratives hardened. Some early participants withdrew as mass adoption took hold.

This is not evidence of failure. It is the trajectory of any successful cultural movement. The more relevant question is what follows.

Why the parallel matters

Understanding the similarities between rave and crypto is not about aesthetics or rebellion. It is about recognising a recurring pattern in social behaviour.

When systems become rigid or lose legitimacy, people do not always confront them directly. More often, they build adjacent alternatives. These systems begin as experimental, provisional, and community-driven. Over time, they either dissolve, adapt, or institutionalize.

Crypto feels like a rave in the 1990s because it occupies the same psychological space: early, uncertain, communal, and full of contradiction. It is still deciding what it wants to become.

The forms differ. The risks differ. The mediums differ. But the underlying impulse is consistent. When existing structures fail to offer access, trust, or a credible vision of the future, people build parallel systems and find one another within them.