Had you walked into Tim Berners-Lee’s office, and asked “can I use the web as a shopfront?” he might have looked at you in bemusement, but most likely he would have just called security. After all, no one working for CERN would have had a commercial reason for being there.
This blog has always had one vague overall topic — identity. Sometimes the clash between inner and outer identity. And even this vague limitation has been stretched over the years to touch many other areas. Bitcoin, which I first mentioned a little under 10 years ago represents a clash with the states defining role with currency. As noted even then, objections to the aim of cryptocurrencies were emerging.
While many technologies garner criticism if they have a clear and possible undesirable outcome, the bunch of technologies that gather around the Web3 moniker seem to be the first to be damned purely because of their backers.
Bitcoin’s famous trust mechanism, the blockchain, was hailed as the future of the internet, as it represented a way to enforce trust between anonymous parties. From that flowed the possibility of a more democratic web with less dependency on the big corporations to manage identities. (Ah, so it is to do with identity.)
Since that point, quite a few home truths have emerged. The blockchain is a very slow and inefficient way to manage a world currency. Many attempts to introduce a blockchain into existing practices have not resulted in any actual decentralisation. The cost to mine cryptocurrency is part of its value, but also appears to challenge climate change goals. In themselves, these are just teething problems with an overhyped technology.
But the zeal to which some of the less palatable internet Mammon have backed projects has led people to believe that Web3 exists solely to support a toxic capitalism that the very worst people are seeking to exploit. More than that — there is no valid reason to support any technology that supports Web3, so toxic are any or all products made with it.
The underlying fear is that the big tech companies want to control more capitalism and think that they can prise away currency and further take over from government. In some cases, the proponents themselves seemed to agree with this dystopian analysis.
I used the word toxic above, because much of this is to do with the personal brand of many tech millionaires and billionaires — their names are everywhere — and how the recent years have tarnished them further. The nexus of un-Woke culture that was summoned by the election of Donald Trump forced many people to polarize their positions. From their lofty perches, many could not see that their sexism, racism and bad work practices were doing irreversible damage to their images.
But the technologies themselves need to be examined separately from their backers. Sadly, many things we take for granted had unwholesome support initially. We know that many tech breakthroughs (like the internet itself) happened on the back of military defence budgets.
NFTs are slightly bizarre in their inception but are not outlandish. The idea is to allow some rights management over digital assets to be handled directly by the registrar. Not in itself particularly epic. The card game Magic The Gathering distributed virtual cards two decades ago. You may play with any card you buy, but clearly you don’t “own” the IP of the card or artwork. The recent explosion of slightly daft uses for NFTs feels like youthful exuberance from those that ‘get it’ (and some sneering from those that don’t.)
The idea of a DAO is perfectly laudable. A transparent democratic organisation run by its members with rights and decisions recorded on the blockchain. Unfortunately the politics within organizations are anything but transparent and are made in coffee shops or bedrooms, and recorded nowhere. To proclaim that some tech might change this suggests naivety — which could be exploited.
Putting tracking information onto the blockchain, along with ‘smart contracts’ seems on the whole to work, although usually in places with benign actors and already trusted systems in place.
In the end these are early times for a bunch of ideas that need work and investment. They may be part of the improvement the web needs — they may be no such thing. I certainly can’t tell from this distance.
So why are they hated quite so much?
In most cases, Web3 is really the fall guy for another issue: The web as it is today.
The web is so good, it almost seems to have dropped from a mediocre sci-fi book. While the web is a modern marvel, possibly THE modern marvel, it has fallen short of some of the ideals that many had in its former years. The self elected guardians of the web had a very clear, if academic idea of what the web should be and how it should operate. Open, scalable, distributed, decentralised, protocol guided and system independent. But the focus was always on publishing, as that has very specific academic meaning.
These items also represented the complete opposite of how the corporate world wanted the web to be. They wanted to use it to communicate with their clients, customers, or workforce, but in very limited way, and only under their control. They considered the idea of individuals self publishing as slightly horrifying.
First of all, they wanted to know who they were communicating with, where they were and how they were communicating. But they didn’t want to share any of this. They wanted to control what the user could see and do. They also wanted more control over the speed of the system, and the security of the system. But there was more.
To act as a shop, business needed an identity and trust system built into the web. When they realised that was never going to happen, the web splintered into walled gardens and eventually the shape we see today. Many of the internet whales have become identity providers, amongst other things.
The people working on Web3 technologies were and still are quite different from the original web guardians. They are (usually) not academics and they definitely are capitalists. They use the term ‘freedom’ in ways that many find disconcerting. After the banking collapse of 2008, the argument for trusting fiat currency was a little shaken, and this gave Bitcoin a bit more popular impetus from traditional finance.
And these different tribes don’t trust each other. The original guys think the new guys are scammers, the new guys think the old guys are gatekeeping. And both have seen evidence to confirm their prejudices. There is no point trying to reconcile these tribes until they get tired of the fighting and seek their own truce.
Until then, we wait between the end of one regime, and the start of the next. But we have to recognise that the web will have to change, morph or adapt just to do what we need it to do now.
