Finding my religion

I think Web3 is real. It’s strange to me that anyone would say otherwise. We wouldn’t be looking for it in the first place if it weren’t real. And I think it’s deeply exciting.

I’m talking about the collection of technologies that we’re now calling Web3. I’m not talking about day trading and speculation. I have no idea whether Bored Ape #7745 is worth $255,726 and I don’t really care. I’m not interested in day trading a long tail of potentially Ponzi crypto and I’m not buying your shitty ripped off NFT. And I know that secret sharing is hard.

But the collection of technologies that we’re now calling Web3 are really incredible and promise to transform the world we live in. Blockchain infrastructure, DAOs, and even NFTs are incredibly exciting. The promise of mass decentralisation is an incredibly exciting one. The Interplanetary Filesystem is fascinating, and self-sovereign identity is one of the most exciting concepts I’ve discovered in years.

I remember the early days of Web2. They were electrifying. Blogging was an incredible and novel thing and RSS was deeply exciting. Dave Winer put enclosures in RSS and something special happened. You can thank him for podcasting. People tagging in Flickr felt transformational. Twitter and Foursquare exploded at SXSW in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

It was an incredibly exciting time. It wasn’t all about money. It felt like the world was changing and the Read-Write Web was going to permanently change the world for the better. We were so optimistic and idealogical.

This moment feels a lot like that too. Watch this video of Christopher Allen giving a talk on self-sovereign identity in February and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

That talk reminds me so much of talks from the early days of Web2 in the days when Flash video embeds were novel and iTunes didn’t have podcast support yet and Ev was best known for Blogger and we all thought citizen journalism was going to usher in a new era of ubiquitous liberal democracy while we self-organised bar crawls with Dodgeball and Foursquare.

Those were the days.

I think these are the days, too.

I’m ready to be optimistic about technology again. I’m ready to dream about what the world will look like when everyone controls their own identity. When everyone once again owns their own printing press. When the internet becomes censorship-resistant again. When artists can profit from their creations on their terms.

There is, of course, reason for caution. Maybe Jack’s right and you don’t own Web3.

Tim O’Reilly has called for caution, saying it’s “too early to get excited about Web3.” He makes two points that really stuck with me. The first is that the technology naturally goes through waves of centralisation and decentralisation and that we should ask “what the next locus for centralisation and control might be.”

He points to “[t]he rapid consolidation of bitcoin mining into a small number of hands by way of lower energy costs for computation indicates one kind of recentralization” as an example, adding that “there will be others.”

And, look, this is just plain funny:

cdixon.eth @cdixon

first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you 👈 we are here then you win

jack⚡️ @jack

@cdixon You’re a fund determined to be a media empire that can’t be ignored…not Gandhi.

I think maybe there’s something else going on here. After all, Square just renamed itself Block. And Block’s investing heavily in building Web3 infrastructure. Whatever you want to call it.

And, look, the reality is that Web2 didn’t totally turn out the way we’d hoped. We were young and naive. We carry scars. We all now understand second-order consequences a lot better than we did back then. The glories of Movable Type gave way to ranked feeds and we lost something along the way. The memes of Tumblr became the preening of Instagram, and the Arab Spring failed.

So many of us Web2 boomers now look to the world like a bunch of cynical bankers. Web2 created trillions and trillions of dollars in value for shareholders while creating a lot of societal disruption. We got so many things wrong and so many of us are now jaded. I think that’s driving some of the skepticism about Web3.

It would be a real shame to let that cynicism get in our way. I believed 20 years ago in decentralisation and ownership and I still do. I believe everyone should have their own printing press, and that everyone should control their own identity.

I believe that the setup and teardown costs of big, democratic institutions should be approximately zero. I believe artists should be able to directly profit from digital manifestations of their work. I also believe that we’ve learned a lot from the failings of Web2 and we can do a better job this time around.

And I still believe the internet should be natively censorship-resistant — and that a distributed reputation system could protect us from the worst consequences of such a system without requiring anyone to censor anything.

There’s a new set of technologies available and they’re really, really cool. They can enable some deeply positive things and they’re very much in their infancy. There are almost no good user experiences yet, and most of the promise of the technology is still unrealised.

And there’s more to do than just build good UX. There are fundamental bits of technology and connective tissue that are still missing.

Tim O’Reilly again:

So much is yet to be created. Let’s focus on the parts of the Web3 vision that aren’t about easy riches, on solving hard problems in trust, identity, and decentralized finance. And above all, let’s focus on the interface between crypto and the real world that people live in…

So many of us have lately been spending cycles on incremental improvements to ad ranking models or similar. New viral mechanics for 30 second videos or better e-commerce checkout flows, or whatever. Because that’s where the money’s been, but also because there hasn’t been much more interesting work to go around.

For a lot of younger people, who didn’t get to live through Web2, this has been their entire career.

But that’s changing now. Web3 has the promise to reorder basic elements of society in deeply positive ways — ways that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. And there’s a clear set of problems to be solved between here and there. Web3 is real. I can’t think of anything more exciting than that.