https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/
"Last year I started to see a lot of talk about blockchains and crypto. In the
mainstream media, on social media, with colleagues and friends. And that was
nothing new. I mean, I’d seen crypto hype cycles before, and as someone who is
not super interested in speculative financial investments it just sort of
wasn’t my thing.
But this time, the message had really changed. There was this new word
everywhere: “web3”. The future of the web, I was being told, was going to be
powered by crypto and blockchains. I was reading that finally, we were going to
fix the web! And that got my attention.
Because the idealism of the early web was compelling. This was a new technology
that would provide everyone, regardless of means, with access to the world’s
knowledge at their fingertips. It would provide equal access to things like
governance and participation in their communities. Borders would no longer
matter. The truth would set people free.
The web that we know today is a far cry from that early idealism. Most people
experience the web filtered through the algorithms of web giants like Google
and Facebook. Where information isn’t paywalled, it’s typically papered with
advertisements. Web corporations squeeze every drop of data out of their users
to resell or to build startlingly detailed advertising profiles. Social media
companies optimize for engagement at the cost of everything else, even if it
means radicalizing or inciting hatred in their users.
There are a lot of people out there who picture the next generation of the web
as one where we reject the extraction and capitalization. I am one of them.
But that “web3” that I started to read about last year, amidst the
advertisements of “fortune favors the brave” and crypto fanatics yelling about
“going to the moon” and telling everyone else to “have fun staying poor”?
That’s not quite how I expected we might get there. But maybe I missed
something, I thought, as I began trying to figure out what web3 even was."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
