Author : @Web3Mario
Introduction : I woke up this morning and saw an interesting news flash. 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 said that he believed that the products he provided were legal and that his work was on the right side of history. But it is clear that for some time, the SEC has not been committed to formulating clear and sensible rules, but has decided to focus on attacking long-term builders such as Uniswap and Coinbase. The so-called Wells Notice refers to the informal reminder issued by the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) to US-listed companies before civil lawsuits. Listed companies that receive the notice can communicate and negotiate with the SEC before receiving formal lawsuits. This reminds me of a thought essay about Web3 written two years ago. I think that with the passage of BTC ETF, traditional funds will enter the encryption field in large quantities, and similar events will become more and more frequent. Looking into the reasons, I think the reasons are precisely the uniqueness of the core value of Web3 and the ideological struggle of Cyberspace induced by it . It is the weekend, and I hope to bring you some casual content.
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Every technology has an ideological bias embedded in it , a tendency to frame the world in one way rather than another , or to assign higher value to one thing than another . The competition between new and old technologies is a competition for time , attention , money, and prestige , and primarily for the dominance of one’s own worldview , a competition that is uniquely fierce in its ideological form .
——Neil Postman , Technopoly
Professor Postman is a scholar whom I respect very much. He is one of the pioneers of the discipline of Mediaecology and is dedicated to exploring the relationship between technology and culture. The opening point comes from his "Technological Monopoly" in the 1990s. Now it seems that this very forward-looking point of view is being verified again by a network revolution called Web3.
I believe that most people who are familiar with Web3 are attracted by the numerous wealth myths in this industry. The influx of a large amount of investment is making this market look like a "new world full of gold". But while cheering, I hope everyone can think carefully about a question: What is the core value of Web3? Is it the low-cost financial services brought by cryptocurrency? 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 affect your actions in Web3, and then affect the future evolution direction, so it is worth our careful consideration.
What is the context of the great Web3 debate ?
In fact, the debate about the value of Web3 continues to this day, and even giving a clear definition of Web3 is a very challenging thing. Therefore, before starting to discuss the core value of Web3, let us screen some representative views to create a consistent context for the following narrative.
First, let’s talk about Web3 supporters. Here are three answers that received a lot of recognition. The first one 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 is from Thomas Stackpole, 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 perspectives, we can extract two key points. First, Web3 is a vision, not a fixed technical architecture or business model. Second, the core of this vision is to change the current mainstream web ownership or control distribution paradigm, emphasizing the autonomy and independence of users in the webworld. A very classic Web3 example is that in the Web3 world, users will regain ownership of their digital assets from third-party platforms.
Take Twitter, a classic Web2 company, as an example. Since the data generated by users during use is exclusively owned by the platform, it can use this data to make profits through an advertising-driven revenue model. But in fact, these values should belong to the users who are data producers. The platform uses a closed ecosystem to achieve data monopoly and steal the interests of users. This is a classic story of Web3 practitioners criticizing Web2.
Guided by such a vision, the design principles of the Web3 project seem to have been formed. On the official website of Ethereum, which is regarded as the most representative Web3 infrastructure, we can find the following :
l Web3 is decentralized: instead of large swathes of the internet controlled and owned by centralized entities, ownership gets distributed amongst its builders and users.
l Web3 is permissionless: everyone has equal access to participate in Web3, and no one gets excluded.
l 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.
l 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 not to be outdone. We also selected three representative views. The first one 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 is from Stephen Dieh, a computer programmer and staunch cryptocurrency critic :
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 one is from Jack Dorsey, 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 views of these three critics are representative. The first one is doubt about the significance of decentralized networks. They believe that decentralization is basically a false demand for Web users. Compared with decentralization, users are more concerned about the efficiency of information interaction in Web applications or other things. And from the results, many successful so-called Web3 companies currently do not actually implement this principle, but just make good use of the marketing effect behind it.
The second is the doubt about the technical defects of blockchain, the infrastructure of Web3. They believe that blockchain has failed as a "distributed database" technology because this invention has not improved the efficiency of query and insertion, and has even caused serious regression, which is usually an important technical indicator for evaluating database technology.
The third is the doubt about the current hyper-financialization of Web3. They usually affirm the significance of decentralization, but believe that the current Web3 is overly dependent on cryptocurrency technology, which has caused Web3 to fall into the dilemma of hyper-financialization. On the one hand, it makes it difficult for the entire industry to escape the laws of economic cycles, and on the other hand, capital monopoly will lead to the re-concentration of power distribution.
The above information is basically a review of the current development of Web3. You will find that the key to resolving disputes lies in figuring out what the core value of Web3 is. I think the answer is that the emergence of Web 3 marks the maturity of Cyberspace ( or to use a trendy concept , that is, Metaverse ) . The proportion of the network in human social life is increasing . Web 3 provides us with a relatively complete network ideology theory and practical technical solutions . From now on , ideology will become a reference dimension for the future development of network technology together with technical performance . In short , the core value of Web3 lies in its cultural value .
Three stages of cyberspace development
Cyberspace is an old concept. As early as 1960, the name first appeared in the artwork of Danish artist Susanne Ussing . However, since the term was very different from now, we will not introduce it in detail. It was not until Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 that the concept of this term was gradually transformed into what we are familiar with with the vigorous promotion of some network libertarians. "Cyberspace is a sense of a social environment that exists purely in the space of representation and communication... It exists entirely in computer space and is distributed in increasingly complex and fluid networks."
In fact, I think the development of the entire Web technology can basically be regarded as the realization process of Cyberspace, bringing this concept from fiction to reality. According to the collaborative relationship and information interaction of network citizens, we can roughly divide this development process into three stages (I’m sorry that the Web+sequential number method cannot fully express my point of view, so I chose other naming standards):
(1) The Classical Free Internet Era
Back in 1989, the World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee marked the official entry of mankind into the information age (of course, this was also inseparable from the popularization of the first generation of MPC (Multimedia PC, multimedia personal computer standard) released by Microsoft). With the help of this information system composed of many interconnected hypertexts accessed through the Internet, we have achieved low-cost, ultra-long-distance, high-speed transmission of information.
Thanks to the relaxed political environment and the craze for globalization at the time, we completed the construction of the underlying technical standards of the Internet in the form of open protocols. Note that the principle of open protocols is that they do not belong to a single company or country. They are similar to the characteristics of the material world and are a neutral network infrastructure.
At this time, anyone can use the Web for low-frequency information interaction (think back to the experience of personal blogs and emails) through three simple technologies: Uniform Resource Identifier (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Internet citizens are usually equal, both builders and users of the network. The process of information interaction directly relies on open protocols. Everyone can use network technology to publish and obtain information according to their own wishes. Therefore, we call this stage the era of classical free Internet.
However, with the continuous emergence of ethical issues in the cyber world, such as extortion, drugs, and child pornography, the government has increased its censorship of online content. During this stage, the main contradiction in the cyber world lies in the contradiction between the open protocol principle and government censorship. Most Internet users believe that personal freedom is the premise of Internet development, and any management measures that damage personal freedom are an infringement of the principle of Internet openness. Many Internet liberals and institutions have emerged, and the typical "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is a landmark product of this stage. These Silicon Valley left-wing elites usually have certain political demands, but due to the fact that the Internet is still in its early stages, Internet life accounts for a small proportion of people's social life, and the number of people who agree with it is small, so the development is not smooth. In fact, at that time , Internet technology was just a tool for most people to quickly transmit information , not much different from a phone .
(2) The era of technological monopoly in the Internet
Next, Cyberspace entered a stage of rapid technological development, and the evolution basically developed in two directions. One was to expand the types of information that the Web can carry, bringing people a more realistic information interaction experience, such as Websocket, AJax, Streaming Media, etc. The second was to lower the technical threshold of the Web, thereby reducing the cost of use and improving the efficiency of information interaction, such as Nginx, Apache, Caddy, etc.
With the explosive growth of network technology, it has become increasingly difficult to master all technologies. On the one hand, the categories of technology are increasing, and on the other hand, the technology is becoming more and more complex. Network citizens have begun to be stratified. According to the difference in motivation, network citizens can be roughly divided into two categories: network users and technology suppliers. Network users pay more attention to information exchange through the Internet, while technology suppliers hope to gain benefits by providing low-cost and efficient technical services or tools to network users. At this time, the process of information exchange gradually relies on the technical services provided by technology suppliers. Therefore, we call this stage the technology monopoly stage. At this time, a large number of network technology companies attract technical experts through high salaries, hoping to achieve technology monopoly and obtain monopoly benefits. This process reached its peak after the emergence of social media applications and advertising-driven revenue models. By introducing advertisers, a seemingly win-win stable network citizen relationship among network users, technology suppliers, and advertisers was formed.
The number of Internet users has become huge, the categories of information have become richer, and the proportion of Internet life in people's social life has increased, making the negative impact of privacy information leakage and illegal surveillance on Internet users more serious. The Snowden incident has completely detonated this bomb, and the main contradiction in the Internet world has gradually shifted to the contradiction between Internet users and technology oligarchs. The root cause of the contradiction lies in the issue of data privacy.
Some technical experts believe that the key reason for the privacy problem is that under the current mainstream Web architecture, the technology oligarchs monopolize network resources and profit from the information of network users. This is intolerable, so it is necessary to completely change this situation from the underlying network technology. In fact, this is Gavin Wood’s original vision of Web 3.0, which is a description of the "post-Snowden era network ":
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 think this is a milestone because it marks the first time that we have a relatively complete ideological perspective to think about the development of network society and guide the development of network technology. In fact, it looks like an anarchist network society system. Before this, the evolution of technology was mainly centered around cost optimization and efficiency improvement.
(3) The Era of Ideological Cyberspace
In order to avoid confusion with cyber political philosophy, the first thing I need to explain is that the ideology here refers to a philosophy of network construction and does not involve political pursuits in real society. I believe that we have now entered the era of ideological Cyberspace. The main feature of this era is that Cyberspace has gained sufficient recognition as an important part of human social life. The new network ideology (or network construction philosophy) and the corresponding network social management system design will provide a new driving force for the development of network technology. From then on, the network world will be divided due to different ideologies while maintaining weak connections.
In this era, the development of the network 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. The difference is that this time, the open protocol spirit of the network infrastructure will determine that this is a bottom-up development process, because building a new network society is a low-cost thing and does not require violent revolution. The network society ideology and management system will increase over time, and different network societies will attract the migration of network residents through their own unique advantages.
The leftward shift of the Cyber Ideology Spectrum and the wave of Internet immigration
After understanding this development context, let us try to review the mainstream Cyber ideology networks that have emerged in the process of Internet development (more detailed analysis will be done in subsequent articles):
- Classical liberal network : This is a network construction philosophy that supports individual freedom of speech above all else and believes that excessive censorship will have a negative impact on the development of the network society. Therefore, this group of network builders usually advocates the establishment of a neutral network infrastructure based on open principles.
- Techno-authoritarian network : This is a network construction philosophy dominated by practicality, which believes that the so-called network society is just a product provided by technology owners to non-technology owners. The core demand of this part of network builders is to obtain commercial benefits by providing a feature-rich and high-performance network;
- Anarchist network : This is a network construction philosophy that opposes all authoritarianism, including technological and political authoritarianism. It believes that no centralized organization or technical solution can bring about a fair network society. Therefore, these network builders usually build network infrastructure based on the principle of decentralization (I think it is appropriate to use the anarchist network to describe the vision of the post-Snowden version of Web3).
- Libertarian capitalist network : This is a network building philosophy dominated by monetization and marketization. It believes that private ownership of digital assets and an unregulated free market are the core of building a fairer cyberspace. This group of network builders advocates the distribution of network social rights through the design of reasonable cryptocurrency-based monetary policies and economic systems (I think it is appropriate to use the term "liberal capitalist network" to describe the vision of hyper-financialized Web3).
We cannot predict what new ideological networks will emerge in the future, or which network will ultimately win in this great struggle, but I think it makes sense to propose an analytical framework at this time. This is a Cyber ideological spectrum, similar to a political spectrum chart, through which we can not only achieve a preliminary positioning of an ideological network, but also locate the ideological tendencies of network users, and then judge the direction of future development.
As shown in the figure, the horizontal axis represents the degree of immersion in Cyberspace. The further to the left, the higher the proportion of the cyber world in social life and the greater the dependence on the Internet. People on the extreme left are usually called CyberPunks, who believe that they live completely in the cyber world, while people on the extreme right are so-called cyber instrumentalists, who believe that the cyber world does not exist at all and that the Internet is merely a tool for delivering information. The vertical axis represents the classic political and cultural axis (authority versus freedom).
Under such a setting, you can see the distribution of the above-mentioned ideological networks. It can be seen that the development of ideological networks has shown a left-leaning trend overall. I believe that this trend will develop further with the development of immersive network technologies, such as VR, AR, Metaverse, etc. I believe that in the near future, we will experience a shocking wave of immigration of network residents. We don’t know which ideological network will become the next mainstream, but the only thing we can be sure of is that whether it is a high return on investment, a stronger sense of product participation, or an excellent privacy protection solution, institutional superiority is the key factor in winning this ideological battle.
