Online these days — that is to say, on social media — there’s an aggressive line of apocalyptic/utopian thinking about the demise of the platform internet, or Web 2.0, and the rise of a new, more perfect web. The prophesy espoused, mostly by bros, is that the next form of the internet, Web3, will create a more open and free internet. The key to it all is the power of blockchain, the “shared, immutable ledger” that tracks transactions or asset exchanges transparently and immediately.
On Web3, people will use cryptocurrency to build, or invest in, new websites — perhaps a new social platform owned in part by every one of its users rather than a tech company. In fact, Web3 has the potential to free us from the tech mega-companies and their algorithms, not to mention their handling and selling of our data — or so its boosters claim. Instead of relying on the Facebooks, Twitters, Tik Toks and Googles of the world to handle our data, we’ll instead put our faith in the original text — we’ll trust in the blockchain. It will offer us “a single view of the truth.”
A lot of people are skeptical about crypto, generally, and Web3 specifically. With good reason. The cryptocurrency market fluctuates wildly, is subject to innumerable scams, and appears at present to be basically a massive Ponzi scheme. But crypto’s centrality in the imagining of a new internet, complete with NFTs and so on, is worth considering, because while crypto and Web3 may be flawed ideas, they are together the symptoms of a deeper sickness of the current web, which is that a lot of people kinda hate it and want something new, if not better. That is to say, while the answer (crypto, Web3, etc.) might be wrong, the question is right: What are we going to do with the internet?
How do we address the fundamental flaws of the internet?
The current version of the internet that we use is neither wholly awful nor wholly terrific, but more and more it feels like a terrible mistake, even at the best of times. While the fix can’t be a massive global scheme to enrich crowd of aggressive tech bros — we have that already — something has to change. The era of global connectivity as it was imagined by Facebook, Twitter, et al. might not be over, but certainly no longer holds the promise it once did. Mass connection, linking ourselves to everyone everywhere hasn’t created the promised utopia — in many ways, it’s created the opposite.
This, for the record, is where the crypto purists lose me a bit. What they’re selling is, at base, a similar promise we were sold a decade or so ago — that the more we’re connected, the more trust would be created. Only, whereas the Zuckerberg-ian social web was predicated on the idea that trust could be built on a connection based on human relationships, crypto is based on the theory that trust is created by a stronger connection to the machine. This is a concern for a lot of reasons, but in any event, the debate over a ‘centralised’ or a ‘decentralised’ web begins to sound a bit like an argument between pedantic ideological purists — like debating Marxist-Leninism vs. Stalinism in trying to establish whether socialism is really possible. Fundamentally, they’re operating from the same basic text/interpretation of the world, which itself might be flawed, thus making all attempts to build from it flawed, too.
Which means you’d have to address those fundamental flaws somehow.
The internet is not going anywhere
Recently it seemed like everyone was talking about the “vibe shift” — a conversation started when New York magazine interviewed Sean Monahan, one of the founding members of K-HOLE, the trend forecasting group that in 2013 foresaw the rise of “normcore”. Trends move suddenly, Monahan told New York writer Allison P. Davis, and he feels like something’s about to change. “I feel like the trajectory of the 2010s has been exhausted in a lot of ways,” Monahan told Davis, citing boredom with culture wars, and social media — both “big pillars we used to navigate pop culture in the 2010s.” And, he said, “we had the rise of all these world-spanning, like, Sauron-esque tech platforms that literally have presences on every continent. People want to make things personal again.”
Which might be true — it feels true. The social web has certainly become impersonal. More to the point, it’s inhumane, both in its basic structure (a casino) and its inherent goals (trapping you in the casino). But if you’re saying here that, well, we simply can’t go back… you’re right! To some extent, that’s true. The internet is not going anywhere. All that can probably change is how we think about using it. In other words, the flaw might not be technical, but instead user error.
Just because the internet is built into our society’s physical and cultural infrastructure, it doesn’t necessarily make its original ideologies inevitable
What jumps out at me most about the crypto/Web3/NFT discourse is how much it sounds like the late-1990s pro-internet preachers. And if a vibe shift is indeed underway, maybe this makes sense. If it’s true that we’re shifting, not fully shifted, then things are still fluid and nobody quite knows for sure where the shift will take us. Under these conditions, describing where we’ll end up naturally begins at the last reference point we have. In our case, that reference point is from about 15 or 20 years ago — it’s the assumption that connection is good.
But the thing is, just because the internet might be built-in to our society’s physical and cultural infrastructure, it doesn’t necessarily make its original ideologies inevitable. The internet can be many things — anything, really. So what if we re-thought our assumptions? What if, for instance, we decided to use the internet, but under the assumption that connection is bad? Maybe we’d end up with something that looks like Web3. Or maybe it would mean something much less complicated for us.
Maybe it would simply mean we use the internet less, more sparingly and carefully — and that in particular, that we would rely on it less to validate ourselves. Perhaps we might make our lives more our own again — in a word, more personal. In this scenario, the last thing we’d do with the internet is interact with everyone on Earth. That would be crazy.
Source: https://onezero.medium.com/what-are-we-going-to-do-with-the-internet-17d0bc69170a