Author: @Web3Mario
Introduction: This morning, I woke up to an interesting piece of news. Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, tweeted that Uniswap Labs received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today. He stated that he believes the products they provide are legal and their work is on the right side of history. However, it is clear that for some time, the SEC has not been committed to formulating clear and wise rules, but has decided to focus on attacking long-term builders such as Uniswap and Coinbase. The so-called Wells Notice refers to an informal reminder issued by the SEC to a publicly traded company before civil litigation. Companies that receive the notice can communicate and negotiate with the SEC before receiving formal litigation. This inevitably reminds me of an essay I wrote about Web3 thinking two years ago. I believe that with the approval of the BTC ETF, the influx of traditional funds into the crypto field will become more and more frequent. Upon further investigation, I believe the main reason lies in the uniqueness of the core values of Web3 and the ideological struggle in Cyberspace that it induces. It's the weekend, and I hope to bring some casual content to everyone.
Body:
Every technology embeds an ideological bias, that is, it tends to construct the world in one way rather than another, or it tends to assign higher value to one thing over another. The competition between new and old technologies is a competition for time, attention, money, and prestige, mainly to seize the dominant position for their own worldview, which is a fierce competition unique to ideological competition.
—Neil Postman, "Technopoly"
Professor Postman is a scholar I greatly respect. He is one of the pioneers of the field of Media Ecology and is dedicated to exploring the relationship between technology and culture. The opening viewpoint comes from his work "Technopoly" in the 1990s, and now it seems that this very forward-looking viewpoint is being revalidated by a network revolution called Web3.
I believe that most people familiar with Web3 are attracted by the numerous wealth myths in this industry. The influx of substantial investments is making this market look like a "new world full of gold." However, amidst the cheers, I hope everyone can carefully consider a question: What is the core value of Web3? Is it the low-cost financial services brought by cryptocurrencies? Is it the privacy protection brought by asymmetric encryption? Or is it the so-called redistribution of network ownership? The answer to this question will greatly influence your actions in Web3, and thus affect the direction of future evolution, so it is worth our careful consideration.
What is the context of the great debate of Web3?
In fact, the debate about the value of Web3 has continued to this day, and even giving Web3 a clear definition is a very challenging task. Therefore, before discussing the core value of Web3, let us filter out some representative viewpoints to create a consistent context for the following narrative.
First are the supporters of Web3. Here are three widely recognized answers. The first comes from Josh Stack, who works at the Ethereum Foundation:
Web 3 is a group of technologies that restructure control over the internet, include more than just cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and other products of cryptoeconomic design.
Web3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens. In web3, ownership and control is decentralized. Users and builders can own pieces of internet services by owning tokens, both non-fungible (NFTs) and fungible.
The third comes from Thomas Stackpole, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review:
Web3 is being touted as the future of the internet. The vision for this new, blockchain-based web includes cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, decentralized finance, and more. It offers a read/write/own version of the web, in which users have a financial stake in and more control over the web communities they belong to.
From these viewpoints, we can distill two key points. First, Web3 is a vision rather than a fixed technological architecture or business model. Second, the core of this vision is to change the current mainstream ownership or control distribution paradigm of the web, emphasizing the autonomy and independence of users in the web world. A very classic example of Web3 is that in the Web3 world, users will reclaim ownership of their digital assets from third-party platforms.
Guided by this vision, it seems that design principles for Web3 projects have been formed. On Ethereum's official website, which is considered the most representative Web3 infrastructure, we can find the following content:
Web3 is decentralized: instead of large swathes of the internet controlled and owned by centralized entities, ownership gets distributed amongst its builders and users.
Web3 is permissionless: everyone has equal access to participate in Web3, and no one gets excluded.
Web3 has native payments: it uses cryptocurrency for spending and sending money online instead of relying on the outdated infrastructure of banks and payment processors.
Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms instead of relying on trusted third-parties.
On the other hand, opponents of Web3 are also not to be underestimated. Similarly, we choose three representative viewpoints. The first comes from Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal:
Decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.
The second comes from Stephen Dieh, a computer programmer and staunch critic of cryptocurrencies:
At its core web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony. The blockchain offers nothing new or worthwhile to the universe of technology. It’s a one trick pony whose only application is creating censorship resistant crypto investment schemes, an invention whose negative externalities and capacity for harm vastly outweigh any possible uses.
The third comes from Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter:
You don’t own “web3.” The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.
The viewpoints of these three critics are representative. The first expresses skepticism about the significance of decentralized networks, believing that decentralization is basically a pseudo-need for web users. Users are more concerned about the efficiency of information interaction in web applications rather than decentralization. Moreover, many successful so-called Web3 enterprises have not actually implemented this principle, but have effectively leveraged the marketing effect behind it.
The second expresses skepticism about the technical flaws of Web3's infrastructure, blockchain. They believe that blockchain, as a "distributed database" technology, has failed because this invention has not improved the efficiency of queries and inserts, and has even led to serious regression, which is an important technical indicator for evaluating database technology.
The third expresses skepticism about the current over-financialization of Web3. They generally affirm the significance of decentralization, but believe that the current Web3 overly relies on cryptocurrency technology, leading to Web3 falling into the dilemma of over-financialization. On the one hand, it makes it difficult for the entire industry to escape the economic cycle, and on the other hand, the monopoly of funds will lead to a re-concentration of power distribution.
The above information is basically a review of the current development status of Web3. You will find that the key to resolving disputes lies in understanding what the core value of Web3 is. I believe the answer is that the emergence of Web3 marks the maturity of Cyberspace (or, to use a trendy concept to replace it, the Metaverse). The proportion of the internet in human social life is increasing, and Web3 provides us with a relatively complete network ideological theory and practical technical solutions. Since then, ideology and technical performance have become reference dimensions for the future development of network technology. In short, the core value of Web3 lies in its cultural value.
The Three Stages of Cyberspace Development
Cyberspace is an ancient concept. The name first appeared in the artwork of Danish artist Susanne Ussing in 1960. However, because the concept was very different from what it is now, we will not go into too much detail. It wasn't until 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, that the concept of this term gradually transformed into what we are familiar with, as it was vigorously promoted by some cyber-libertarians. "Cyberspace is a feeling of a social environment that exists purely in the space of representation and communication… It exists entirely in computer space, distributed in an increasingly complex and fluid network."
In fact, I believe that the development of the entire Web technology can basically be seen as the realization process of Cyberspace, bringing this concept from novels to reality. According to the collaborative relationships of internet users and the ways of information interaction, we can roughly divide this development process into three stages (I apologize for not being able to fully express my point of view using the Web+ numbering method, so I have chosen another naming standard):
(1) Classical Free Network Era
Time goes back to 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web marked the formal entry of humanity into the information age (of course, it also cannot be separated from the popularization of the first generation MPC (Multimedia PC) released by Microsoft). With the help of this information system composed of many interconnected hypertexts accessed through the internet, we achieved long-distance, high-speed transmission of low-cost information.
Thanks to the relaxed political environment and the trend of globalization at the time, we completed the construction of the underlying technical standards of the internet in an open protocol manner. It is important to note that the principle of open protocols does not belong to any company or country; it is similar to the characteristics of the material world and is a neutral network infrastructure.
At this time, anyone could engage in low-frequency information interaction using the Web through three simple technologies: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The internet users were generally equal, serving as both builders and users of the network. The process of information interaction directly relied on open protocols, allowing everyone to publish and access information using network technology based on their own will. Therefore, we refer to this stage as the Classical Free Network Era.
However, with the continuous emergence of ethical issues in the online world, such as ransomware, drugs, and child pornography, governments increased their scrutiny of online content. The main contradiction in this stage of the online world was between the principle of open protocols and government censorship. Most internet users believed that personal freedom was a prerequisite for the development of the internet, and any measures that infringed upon personal freedom were seen as violations of the open principles of the internet. Many cyber-libertarians and organizations emerged during this stage, and notable works such as "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" were produced. These Silicon Valley left-wing elites typically had certain political demands, but were constrained by the early stage of internet development, with a relatively small proportion of the population engaging in online life. In fact, at that time, network technology was just a tool for quickly transmitting information for most people, not much different from a telephone.
(2) Technological Monopoly Network Era
Next, Cyberspace entered a stage of rapid technological development, evolving in two main directions. First, expanding the types of information that the Web could carry, providing users with a more realistic information interaction experience, such as Websocket, Ajax, and Streaming Media. Second, lowering the technological barriers of the Web, reducing the cost of use, and improving the efficiency of information interaction, such as Nginx, Apache, and Caddy.
With the explosive growth of network technology, mastering all the technologies became increasingly difficult. On one hand, the number of technology categories continued to grow, and on the other hand, the technologies became more complex. As a result, internet users began to stratify. Based on their motivations, internet users could generally be divided into two categories: network users and technology providers. Network users were more focused on information interaction through the internet, while technology providers aimed to profit by providing low-cost and efficient technical services or tools to network users. At this stage, the process of information interaction gradually relied on the technical services provided by technology providers, leading to what we refer to as the Technological Monopoly Stage. During this time, numerous network technology companies sought to achieve technological monopolies and gain monopolistic profits by attracting technical experts with high salaries. This process peaked with the emergence of social media applications and the advertising-driven revenue model, forming what appeared to be a stable tripartite relationship between network users, technology providers, and advertisers.
The number of network users grew significantly, the variety of information expanded, and online life became a larger part of people's social lives. As a result, issues such as privacy breaches and illegal surveillance had a more severe negative impact on network users. The Snowden incident completely ignited this bomb, shifting the main contradiction in the online world from the conflict between open principles and government censorship to the conflict between network users and technological oligarchs, with the root of the conflict lying in data privacy issues.
Some technical experts believed that the key reason for privacy issues was the monopoly of network resources by technological oligarchs under the current mainstream architecture of the Web, and the profiteering from the exclusive information of network users. This was deemed intolerable, and a fundamental change in this situation was needed at the foundational level of network technology. In fact, this was Gavin Wood's original vision of Web 3.0, which was a description of a "post-Snowden era network" as follows:
Web 3.0, or as might be termed the “post-Snowden” web, is a re-imagination of the sorts of things we already use the web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties. Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information we assume to be agreed upon, we place on a consensus ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal. Communication always takes place over encrypted channels and only with pseudonymous identities as endpoints; never with anything traceable (such as IP addresses).
I believe this was a milestone, as it marked the first time we used a relatively complete ideological perspective to consider the development of the online society and guide the development of network technology. In fact, this seemed to be a form of anarchism-guided network social system. Prior to this, technological evolution mainly revolved around cost optimization and efficiency improvement.
(3) Ideological Cyberspace Era
To avoid confusion with political philosophy in the online world, it is important to clarify that the term "ideology" here refers to a philosophy of network construction and does not involve political pursuits in the real world. I believe that we have now entered the era of Ideological Cyberspace, where the main characteristic is that Cyberspace has gained sufficient recognition as an important part of human social life. New network ideologies (or network construction philosophies) and corresponding designs for network social governance will provide new impetus for the development of network technology. As a result, the online world will become divided due to different ideologies, while still maintaining weak connections.
In this era, the development of the online society is unlikely to follow an exclusive single-threaded path, which is why I don't like the name Web3. The situation will be very similar to the development of political philosophy after the Enlightenment, but what's different this time is that the open protocol spirit of the network infrastructure will determine that this is a bottom-up development process, as building a new network society is a low-cost endeavor that does not require violent revolution. Over time, the network society's ideology and management system will become more and more diverse, and different network societies will attract network residents to migrate through their unique superiority.
The Leftward Shift of the Cyber Ideological Spectrum and the Wave of Network Immigration
Understanding this development context, let's try to review the mainstream Cyber ideological networks that have emerged during the development of the internet (more detailed analysis will be done in subsequent articles):
- Classical Liberal Network: This is a network construction philosophy that prioritizes individual freedom of speech above all else. It believes that excessive censorship will have a negative impact on the development of the network society. Therefore, these network builders typically advocate for the establishment of a neutral network infrastructure based on open principles.
- Technological Authoritarian Network: This is a practicality-driven network construction philosophy that views the so-called network society as a product provided by technology owners to non-technical owners. The core demand of these network builders is to obtain commercial benefits by providing feature-rich and high-performance networks.
- Anarchist Network: This is a network construction philosophy based on the principle of opposing all forms of authority, including technological and political authority. It believes that any centralized organization or technical solution cannot bring about a fair network society. Therefore, these network builders typically establish network infrastructure based on decentralization principles (I believe it is appropriate to use the term "anarchist network" to describe the vision of Web3 after Snowden).
- Free Capitalist Network: This is a network construction philosophy dominated by monetization and marketization. It believes that the private ownership of digital assets and an unregulated free market are the core of building a fair cyberspace. These network builders advocate for the distribution of network social rights through the design of reasonable cryptocurrency-based monetary policies and economic systems (I believe it is appropriate to use the term "free capitalist network" to describe the vision of a highly financialized Web3).
We cannot predict what novel ideological networks will emerge in the future, or which network will ultimately win in this great competition. However, I believe that it is meaningful to propose an analytical framework at this time. This is a Cyber ideological spectrum, similar to a political spectrum, through which we can preliminarily position an ideological network and determine the ideological tendencies of network users, thereby judging the direction of future development.
As shown in the image, the horizontal axis represents the degree of immersion in Cyberspace. The further left it is, the higher the proportion of social life in the network world and the greater the dependence on the network. It is generally believed that the far-left group is the so-called CyberPunks, who believe they live entirely in the network world, while the far-right group is the so-called network utilitarians, who believe the network world does not exist at all and that the network is merely a tool for transmitting information. The vertical axis represents the classic political and cultural axis (authority vs. freedom).
In this setting, you can see the distribution of the above ideological networks, which shows an overall left-leaning trend in the development of ideological networks. I believe that this trend will further develop with the development of immersive network technologies, such as VR, AR, Metaverse, etc. I believe that in the near future, we will experience a wave of shocking migration of network residents. We do not know which ideological network will become the next mainstream, but the only thing that can be certain is that institutional superiority is the key factor in winning this ideological struggle, whether it is a high return on investment, a stronger product participation experience, or an excellent privacy protection solution.
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