Notes on Web3

It’s possible you have, in recent months, seen people writing with excite­ment (or curiosity, or consternation) about “Web3”. The term imagines the tran­si­tion of many internet services to a model built around cryp­to­graphic tokens, such that ownership and/or control of those services might be divided between their token-holders, a group that might include their users. The tokens would also have exchange value, so, as a user, you could always: cash out 🤑

Ethereum is the locus of most of this work — hey, who named that client library web3.js, anyway? — so it’s not unrea­son­able to read “Web3” as “Ethereum-powered internet”.

This message was emailed to lab newsletter subscribers. The assumed audience is subscribers who know roughly what Web3 is supposed to be, but aren’t sure what to think about it. (Here’s more about assumed audiences.)

If you are already convinced that Web3 is the appro­priate next step for the world’s inter­net­worked computer systems: this post is not for you. Go forth!

Instead, this is for people still sort of … cautiously curious?

Cards on the table: I am not merely a skeptic, but a full-fledged enemy of Web3. I hope my animosity can’t be instantly dismissed: “He’s a hater; he’s old; he doesn’t under­stand the technology.” I am, in fact, old — 41! — but, as miti­gating evidence: I write science fiction; am deeply curious about the future(s) of the internet; and even produced a well-received NFT project.

I don’t intend any great rhetor­ical effect with the notes below; I just want to offer them as meager coun­ter­weight to the growing hype. I think Web3 speaks strongly to people whose thoughts bend often toward those internet futures … so, in a sense, I’m posting this for other versions of myself. Hello!

Here are my notes on Web3:

• It’s for kids. I mean that in a good way! I think Web3 has resonated power­fully with young people because it feels like something genuinely new, and it feels like it can be theirs. Who could argue with those feelings? Not me.

• I think Web3 is propelled by exhaus­tion as much as by excite­ment. This isn’t apparent on the surface, but I believe it’s there, lurking just below. If you are 22 years old, Twitter has been around for about as long as you’ve known how to read. YouTube is fixed as firmly as the stars. I honestly don’t know how that feels, but I wonder if it’s claustrophobic?

• I have vivid memories of the ferment of the late 2000s, a new social network flaring up every week! I lived in San Francisco; they were building them in offices around a narrow, scraggly park. That fun froth hardened into a compact dramatis personae that has remained basically unchanged for years now. So, here comes Web3 — and the basic emotional appeal of NEW OPTIONS cannot be overstated.

• Many Web3 boosters see them­selves as disruptors, but “tokenize all the things” is nothing if not an obedient contin­u­a­tion of “market-ize all the things”, the campaign started in the 1970s, hugely successful, ongoing. In a way, the World Wide Web was the rupture — “Where … is the money?”—which Web 2.0 smoothed over and Web3 now attempts to seal totally.

• A large fraction of Web3’s magnetism comes from the value of the under­lying cryptocurrencies. Therefore, a good diag­nostic question to ask might be: would you still be curious about Web3 if those curren­cies were worthless, in dollar terms? For some people, the answer is “yes, absolutely”, because they find the foun­da­tional puzzles so compelling. For others, if they’re honest, the answer is “nnnot reallyyy”.

• I didn’t produce my NFT project in 2019 or 2020; I produced it in early 2021, when a wave of hype, whipped up by tales of windfalls, came crashing across my screen. That’s me being honest!

• “I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things, and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who, thanks to money, am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my inca­pac­i­ties into their contrary?”

• The money thing confounds evaluation; it’s like trying to look at a star next to the sun. The same was true for the World Wide Web in the year 2000, of course; and, if that’s the analogy, what do we make of it?

• The term Web3 plays on “Web 2.0”, popu­lar­ized in the 2000s to describe a new gener­a­tion of websites and web platforms. As a philosophy, Web 2.0’s success was incomplete, to say the least: there was a whole thick strand of ambition around the exchange of data in modular, permis­sive ways between platforms, which basically died — or was killed. With that in mind, I think Web3 is a fine term for this new set of ideas, because it will certainly play out the same way: influ­encing the direction of the internet, but incompletely; unpredictably.

• Even at compa­rable stages in their development, the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 were not quite so … self-referential? They were about other things — science and coffee pots, links and camera lenses — while Web3 is, to a first approximation, about Web3.

• Web3 is best under­stood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific.

• Web3 promises rewards — maybe even a kind of justice — for “users”, but Ethereum doesn’t know anything about users, only wallets. One user can control many wallets; one bot can control many wallets; Ethereum can’t tell the difference, doesn’t partic­u­larly care. Therefore, Web3’s gover­nance tools are appro­priate for decision-making processes that approx­i­mate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, anything that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned! — value of person­hood.

• The somewhat-ridiculed cryp­tocur­rency Worldcoin, with its retina-scanning orb, is one attempt to solve this problem. There are others. They tie them­selves into knots trying to arrive at person­hood in a universe of wallets.

• A UNIVERSE OF WALLETS.

• I have a hunch there is some equiv­a­lent to Gödel’s incom­plete­ness theorem waiting in the wings for Web3 governance. Remember: The DAO — first of its kind, from which all present DAOs take their name — failed so badly it required a fork of the Ethereum blockchain. The buzzy Friends With Benefits “social token” was hacked, and its recon­sti­tu­tion was managed not with the mech­a­nisms of Web3 gover­nance, but “out-of-band”, on Twitter, Medium, and Discord. This is going to keep happening!

• I feel like this simple premise is often lost in the haze: the Ethereum Virtual Machine, humming heart of Web3, is a computer that charges you many dollars to execute a very small program very slowly. It does so in an envi­ron­ment with special properties, and in some cases, those prop­er­ties are worth the expense. In others … it’s like running your website on a TRS-80 with a coin slot.

• A key characteristic — really, a key aesthetic—of most (all?) blockchains is immutability. They are ledgers, after all. But, these days, where the internet is concerned, I find myself more inter­ested in the opposite; in muta­bility and ephemerality. I like things that can change and grow, then vanish.

• I am a BIG fan of deletion, an operation basically anti­thet­ical to Web3.

• What do we lose when we lose deletion?

• At this point, Ethereum is here to stay (for a decade, at least), which means the same is probably true for Web3. I would like to see it fire­walled into the realm of finance and the finance-adjacent: speculation games.

I’ll close with credit where due: Ethereum should inspire anyone inter­ested in the future(s) of the internet, because it proves, power­fully, that new protocols are still possible. I do not think Web3 is a desirable or even tolerable path forward for this web right here, but I take its lesson well. “Code wins arguments”, and so do clubs, and cults; time remains to build all three.

November 2021, Oakland