The chicken-and-egg question applies far beyond poultry, to include the relationship between a society and the technology it produces. Or is it the opposite? One might ask, is society a product of the same technology that you come into contact with every day?

Just as wheels and steam engines changed the way people move, profoundly impacting entire economies and global cross-cultural exchange, the Internet and apps now shape the way we do many other things, including thus also determining our culture and history. The idea at play here is aptly called “technological determinism”, and it has been very present in some of the recent discussions about Web3 and blockchain.

The pendulum swings

Web3, a more decentralized internet with user-owned data and digital assets, is what most in the blockchain space aspire to. In some ways, it’s still an idea at this stage, and some think this idea has become stale before it even came to fruition. Enter Web5, the project of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, an idea so forward-thinking that it jumps to Web4 on its way.

Dorsey has long despised the direction the Web3 industry is taking, once declaring that this next-generation network will be much like Web2, but with venture capital funds at the helm. While the industry is indeed not perfect, nothing is, let’s be honest, such a take might make the most spiteful wonder if Web5 would then be Web3 with the VCs ousted by Dorsey.

In essence, both questions also betray a certain kind of determinism. By stating that “you will not own Web3,” Dorsey assumes that today’s social, political, and economic relationships will determine our future technology. The same applies to a similar question about Web5, as it is based on the same intellectual foundation.

Blockchain is a curious case study from a deterministic perspective, especially when you look at its origins. While many of its underlying concepts and algorithms date back to the previous century, the work that spearheads its use for trustless peer-to-peer value exchanges (Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous Bitcoin whitepaper) was published in late 2008, at a time when of turmoil in the financial world The spirit of the times exposed the many flaws of the financial system as it was then; was the cause, and Bitcoin was the effect, born out of the socioeconomic state of the world.

Now that the cat is out of the box, the pendulum swings back. Once the product of a society in search of a more effective financial system, cryptocurrencies are now having their own impact on society as their adoption and popularity grows. And while this process may lend itself to a deterministic review, today’s prism may not be the best one to look at tomorrow.

Blockchain is what you make of it

At its core, blockchain is a permissionless, peer-to-peer technology that works with the support and participation of the community. As such, it defies doom and gloom through its sheer design: there are no kings in a peer-to-peer network, only early investors reap the abundant profits just as they would any other industry or individual company aiming for the darling. Despite being more centralized now than in its early days, Bitcoin still has no central bank or authority. Its unintended centralization is natural to any system in motion, and its rules of the game are laid out in its protocol, allowing anyone who thinks they can do better to fork it and take a stab at it.

There are other ways that blockchain could advance our society in terms of our broader governance and other frameworks. The blockchain space lives and breathes the spirit of community, with individual builders and enthusiasts coming together around the projects and causes they love. This may point to a larger and gradual societal transition towards decentralization, with local communities gaining more autonomy from centralized powers.

Similarly, the rise of DAOs suggests the way we might do business in the future. We will do away with traditional management verticals and revenue sharing models in favor of a system where every project participant has a stake and a voice in it and enjoys more individual ownership.

That said, in the same way that the impact of automation on the job market depends on how companies implement it, the social impact of blockchain will depend on more than the technology itself. As we know from TradFi, money loves company, and this law of gravity is already very present in the crypto space, from the huge impact whales have on market fluctuations to the increasing centralization of Bitcoin mining.

Traps, present and future

In a way, with its code-is-law maxim, the blockchain space functions as coded and enforceable capitalism, and for all the good it can do, there are pitfalls for the community to be aware of. Take the story of the BadgerDAO hack, where a malicious actor used a quick loan to hijack the governance mechanism and take out the project’s treasury.

Imagine a real election being hijacked in this way, not even necessarily through a loan, but through the sheer financial power of an old age whale; or a corporation buying the government into a DAO that is tasked with keeping terrorist communications off the web to silence its rivals. Something similar may or may not be happening in the Web2 space, and blockchain could establish a more convenient framework for that.

Through its design and its underlying values, blockchain has the ability to fundamentally transform our society for the better, granting more ownership and autonomy to ordinary people at the expense of centralized powers. However, as we work towards it, whatever the number after “Web”, it is important not to allow the failures of the current financial, socio-economic, political and other systems to carry over into the new one.

Leonard Dorlöchter is an entrepreneur who co-founded peaq