As with any narrative, the Web3 narrative serves certain stakeholders and is, in turn, driven by them to serve their interests.

For one thing, it’s VCs’ easy exhortation of a euphemism for the term K Street doesn’t favor (“crypto”); on the other, it’s a half-hearted attempt by the mob on LinkedIn/Twitter to rally behind what they see as the next big thing; on a third side, it is a proactive effort by some entrenched crypto players to take advantage of VC marketing and try to legitimize themselves; and, from a fourth quarter, it is a preemptive campaign by the deeply entrenched tech industry giants to manage market expectations and position themselves as the inevitable winners of this ostensibly evolutionary trend.

Let’s pull back the curtain and demystify what happens behind the scenes.

The original web (static): access to information, search and electronic commerce

“Well, I found it frustrating that in those days there was different information on different computers, but you had to log in to different computers to get it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So figuring out how things worked was really hard. Often it was easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.”

That was his wow moment, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee went on to invent a fundamentally new way of sharing information using hypertext. He also managed to invent HTML, HTTP and the ideas behind URI/URL in his spare time and coded the first web browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first web server (“httpd”) to boot.

Now, to give credit where credit is due, prolific inventor Vannevar Bush had previously envisioned annotated research libraries similar to today’s hyperlinks, and it’s no coincidence that link analysis eventually became the cornerstone of search algorithms. . The search led to compliance, that is, buying and selling over the web, and the advent of SSL 1.0 to secure online transactions sealed the deal, so to speak.

We had become “consumers” online. Then modern Silicon Valley took over doing what it does best, which is “capture” value, and we saw what followed with the dotcom crash.

The Second (Dynamic) Web: User-Generated Content, Social Media, and Surveillance Capitalism

The Web 2.0 label emerged as a catch-all phrase to refer to the growing model of allowing consumers to interact and collaborate with one another through “social media,” driven virally by “user-generated content.” This was in contrast to the first wave of the Web, where users were limited to passively “consuming” any content that was presented through the HTTP pipeline from the website.

Berners-Lee did not like this catchphrase; he is said to have described it as slang. But we didn’t care, and with the advent of Facebook, YouTube, etc., we were captivated by the new “social” web (VC lingo) or the “read and write” web (tech industry lingo) and now we were all content creators Life was good until we realized that no one else was paying and now we had all become the “product”.

The prophets who had predicted a shift of control towards the user and the consumer-creator continue to face the reality of a dystopian system of surveillance capitalism; “the one-sided claim of private human experience as free raw material to translate into behavioral data”, to quote Professor Shoshanna Zuboff.

Yes, it’s free, but at what price? Loss of privacy, corporate and state surveillance, undermining and seeding, and fueling mistrust at the local, national and supranational levels, and sowing division left, right and center. But remember, ads are personalized and behavior manipulation is subliminal to give the devil his comeuppance.

The legacy of Web 2.0 will be seen in the way it reconciles its identity as an extraordinary profit-making machine that turned commercial and business models upside down with its own controversial beginnings of 21.^st paper of the century in the American zeitgeist.

Sovereignty: what the web is not and what blockchains are all about

“We have proposed a system of electronic transactions without relying on trust.” That was the succinct conclusion of Satoshi Nakamoto in his seminal article.

A system for electronic transactions without depending on a trusted third party.

That’s it. There’s nothing there about the Web, Web 2.0, or the so-called Web 3.0. If you are building a system for electronic transactions without relying on a trusted third party, then use blockchains. Otherwise, go your merry way.

In practical terms, blockchains are economic platforms that allow the development of systems to process electronic transactions without relying on a trusted third party. Why economic platforms? Because, unlike all traditional computing platforms, blockchain platforms have built-in economic incentives that ensure the integrity of the infrastructure.

However, not relying on a trusted third party has side effects, in particular sovereignty, i.e. control over relevant (private) data or other assets, the ability to choose where such assets are stored and/or custodied, and the ability to provide access. to relevant data (or not) to those who need it for as long as you choose.

Sovereignty is interesting; It is significant, and it will be fundamental in the coming years. You know this and I don’t need to say more here.

The community didn’t need to use the term Web3 until VC types came along; To come full circle, Berners-Lee recently said that “In fact, Web3 is not the web at all,” and he has his own proposal called “Web 3.0” to reshape the Internet, to add to the word salad; maybe, it’s time to drop this baggage and just call it blockchain. No more no less.