Web3 is just a fresh batch of the same old crypto nonsense
You have probably, unless you have been unusually lucky, been trained in the wonders of Web3. For the remaining lucky few, let me explain. Web3 is the relentless fate of the internet – the magical substance that blockchain-based decentralized dreams are made of and dystopian high-tech nightmares are destroyed by. The future is bright; the future is “addible” databases.
The central thesis of Web3 is that because the internet has become so centralized – with power concentrated in the hands of a few, and users powerless over their own data – we need a more distributed, egalitarian, open system. So far, so affordable.
But the moment you look beneath the surface, gaping holes appear in the Web3 vision. Its techno-utopian spokesmen say they want to harness the alleged power of blockchains – the unchanging databases that underpin bitcoin and other tokens – to create a democratized internet where you control your own data and are no longer dependent on the big technology giants. Web3, the argument goes, will allow you to “own part of the internet”. Of course, the “decentralized” apps and organizations operating in this bold new world are powered by cryptocurrencies: all you have to do is buy them.
In truth, Web3 has become just the latest marketing term used to try to back up and package the overlapping ideas of crypto, non-fungible tokens and “decentralized finance”, all of which seemed brilliant innovations until the whole market began to tap. Regardless, blockchain – once identified as the solution to everything from corrupt choices to supply chain fraud – has totally failed to live up to the hype and has only proven its usefulness as an enabler for the crypto casino. This time will be different.
It is difficult to even discuss Web3 because it, like many similar hyped concepts, is a very vague concept. I had a bit of a heated exchange last weekend with someone who claimed that Web3 was about banks processing data to predict your divorce and downgrade your credit rating before you realize that your spouse is having an affair. That, I argued, was about Big Data and artificial intelligence, which has nothing to do with blockchains or distributed ledgers. But just like the meta-verse and the “fourth industrial revolution” before that, Web3 often seems to be used to mean something along the lines of “technical things that can do things in the future”.
The concept itself comes from the idea that we have had two iterations of the web: the first, launched in the early 90’s, lasted for a little over a decade and consisted mainly of static websites that were not interactive. The other, which arrived in the early 2000s and continues to this day, allowed users to upload their own content to the web, but in doing so, the user inadvertently became the product.
Perhaps the most sincere and damaging aspect of Web3 is the lie that it’s really about decentralization. Its biggest supporters are Andreessen Horowitz – or a16z – a venture capital firm with more than $ 28 billion in billionaire co-founders and assets under management, which launched a $ 4.5 billion Web3 fund earlier this year. Apart from the fact that launching a multi-billion dollar fund seems like a certain concentration of wealth, this company is also a major Web2 investor: it has, for example, a stake in Meta, formerly known as Facebook, on whose board a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen is still sitting.
“Power. “I think there are ways to achieve decentralization on the Internet,” she tells me, “but I necessarily see these solutions as based on social and political change. than in pure technological change. “
Meanwhile, companies such as the a16z-backed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase – which until recently made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits every quarter – are positioning themselves as the “standard gateway to the Web3 ecosystem”. Quite strange that an internet that is about openness and decentralization would need a corporate behemoth to provide entry.
Web3 is not about making the internet fairer or less prone to the exploitation of greedy fat cats, it is actually the opposite: it is about introducing yet another layer of online funding. Reality is therefore actually much simpler than the jargon you have to go through when someone is going to explain it to you. Web3 is just the latest way to serve the same old crypto nonsense, and it stinks as bad as ever.
