Archived: Notes on Web3

From: Robin Sloan
To: the lab
Sent: November 2021

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!

• Does a “Web3” that depends on Twitter for its mar­ket­ing and coor­di­na­tion chan­nel really deserve the name? You might say, “Oh, just wait; Web3 will make a Twit­ter of its own.” No, it won’t. Such a plat­form would be use­less to Web3, because there would be no one there to recruit 😈

• 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