Rebuilding Utopia
BY
Lars Porsena
Photo by Serhii Tyaglovsky on Unsplash
Part I: They stole our revolution: we're taking it back.
For every utopia, a dystopia. Web 1.0 promised to bypass media gatekeepers and let more direct forms of democracy flourish. Web 2.0 created vast new networks of socially-connected peers.
But revolutions get stolen. It happens: it happened.
The wild and weird old Web became a grim provincial shopping centre, more or less. It’s now a dull joint indeed, surveilled by bored security guards and beady-eyed advertisers. Digital-first uprisings and urgent flickerings of harder, deeper political freedoms like the Arab Spring imploded: freedoms briefly tasted then lost. And the big social networks became cesspools, conduits for rage and disinformation - less love, more lies; less truth, more bile.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
But something new is coming. A slow combination of advances in cryptography and network architecture has led to real and tangible innovation where it ought to be: where money and government and desire meet.
Under the overarching metaphor of ‘reimagining the world computer’ - an immodest way of describing the operating system of finance and society - Web 3 is now aimed at reforming the way global systems operates, how the shareholder-owned corporation can be rewired. It’s not there yet: not by a long shot.
What’s on the table here? Not only how money can flow in future, but how information moves, how science is conducted and funded, and how mission-critical support systems like a free, fair and reliable media can run.
Existing systems are being challenged not only in theory, but through practical projects with global reach.
Yet some, we see, have already called time on Web3.
They say it has entered the dystopian phase already, overrun by bad actors, by predatory capital, and that it is built on weak technology, fanciful economics.
Web3, they say, functions as a mere amplifier of inequality: it is more of a technological symptom of despair rather than cure. It has no fundamental economic value, merely speculative value, plus some tasty extra-judicial features for tax avoiders. Do we really want fully-automated drug cartels? There’s a coin for that.
Lastly, we might consider that a core philosophical idea - decentralisation - is an anti-goal, that it comes with hardwired tradeoffs we might prefer not to make. We’ll come back to the topic of decentralisation in future posts, since it seems to animate some considerable excitement and mutual misunderstanding.
Where both sides agree: Web3 is a superfluorescent, high-speed, boundlessly various, fully web-native phenomenon, humming with potential.
Like it or not, it’s time for change: we’ve hardly scratched the possibilities yet.
Part II: Let's Fix This Up
As should be evident by now, we’re short term bearish on Web3, long-term bullish.
It’s crashingly obvious that finance (already more than quasi-digital) will only become more so, and that this inevitably gets entangled with big, knotty questions around digital identity, with permissions, access and ownership.
What’s the best way forward? Crypto is now unsafe, hard to use, and player incentives appear mainly to be to keep the corruption going until the music stops. We therefore welcome the current crypto winter, in which the more egregiously stupid or corrupt projects will freeze to death.
It has become evident that to effect useful, lasting change here, there’s a role for government, thus far asleep at the wheel or minded to encourage innovation by leaving it alone.
But, markets can’t do this on their own either. Government exists to fund, regulate and coordinate things markets can't, won't, or don't. Web3 is no different.
Next, where do we find the most pressure to move things forward? The future is both more pressing and more present in places where human need is greatest, and legacy technologies are not the incumbents. We therefore expect more innovation at the ‘edges’.
Taking one of the core benefits of Web3 to be the direct aggregation and coordination of capital with a minimum number of middlemen and rent-seekers, then certain moves become possible. Here are just four examples we’re thinking about.
Zero Rated - In 2010, Facebook worked with mobile ISPs to zero-rate the cost of Facebook data for end users, in sixty emerging economies. With this one strategy - bundling content and connectivity - Facebook in effect 'became the whole internet' in many nations, and a market leader in many more. This creates almost a single point of control, failure and/or manipulation for governments in those nations. Needless to say, incredibly awful things happened: Facebook carelessly presided over attempted genocides, while governments have achieved ‘supertotalitarian’ control of media and surveillance using mobile infrastructure. A privacy-first, decentralised mobile ISP is a revolution waiting to happen. Will it?
Central Bank Digital Currencies - As late as the 1970’s almost 60% of the population of Britain did not have a bank account. Vast swathes of the world are similarly unbanked today. CDBC's (central bank digital currencies) have none of the decentraloid zealotry for distributed ownership or self-regulation, which is a good thing indeed. But the mere arrival of retail-level financial services will inevitably have crypto-components, informed by - if not adhering to - Web 3 ideas. Some might think this insufficiently exciting: we don’t.
WeFi - cashmobs are the new flashmobs: a sudden flexing of consumer capital to realise a cause. DAOs enable crowdfunding mechanics and attempt to blend this with project coordination. Project crowdfunding is currently limited to hipster trinkets (Kickstarter) while equity crowdfunding provides sources of funding to startups (Crowdcube). WeFi offers the exciting possibility of hybrid, pro-social financial instruments: funding by the people and for the people. As a bonus, anything that can seriously compete with traditional venture capital (their management fees, their short investment horizons and so on) has to be a net positive.
DeSci - Web3 principles are spreading into new areas. A diverse amalgamation of scientists, entrepreneurs and educators are proposing ways to measure reputation and methods to distribute IP and research under the new moniker of ‘distributed science’. Open Access policies and novel ways to fund Open Science are being experimented with, which includes research and development of new drugs (generics and otherwise) that may have major impacts on treatment of currently underfunded diseases in both developed and developing countries.
Where Liminal fits in
If you don’t know us, here it is: the Liminal community is jointly united by the idea of collective intelligence for the greater good.
We have previously worked on global international development projects and we are already engaged in major web3 governance projects and building new data unions.
We use a bunch of different tools and practices to guide our research. Here are four:
Flags - Who’s talking? Web3 is a fizzing, foaming, hard-to-navigate source of disinformation. Enthusiasts are pumping, critics dumping, news sources turn out to be non-credible vehicles for hedge funds, and so on. We ‘flag’ sources to find out who’s talking… and what their real incentives are.
Lenses - We generate 'lenses' A lens is an opinionated view: the weirder the better. Anything that can allow us to re-see a project from a different perspective (technical, historical, applied, out-of domain) helps to separate hype from reality..
Open Door - Our research methodology is highly open, highly adaptive and always collaborative. For any serious exploration, we like to hire new friends to help us research. Could that be you?
Texture - texture, by which we mean the actual experience of new technologies. Detail, drudgery and delight matter. We like to feel the process, and taste the soup. Using the thing always beats reading about it.
The end results of this ongoing research programme will continue to be in this form: ugly, plural, awkward.
Because that’s what Web3 is: many simultaneous voices and only-aperiodic consensus.
Note on Optimism
We’ve been a little harsh on web3 haven’t we? So full of hope, yet so far to go. But finally, we’re on the same team: looking for change.
We know that for every person that wants to see sustainable change, there are three that don’t, four that won’t, and five who would greatly prefer not to know either way.
So together, we can learn. And we can act. We can make mistakes: and perhaps even get something useful done.
Are you in?
