Super Bowl Sunday was in a lot of ways a coming out party for Web 3. It felt like half of the ads were some celebrity advocating for their crypto platform of choice. Facebook gave us a glimpse in to the metaverse with perhaps the most insane commercial of the day. It’s been a whole week since the game, and I have now had a chance to process this. And I just can’t shake the feeling that this whole Web3 thing is going to be more of the same internet. In fact, it’s probably going to be worse.
The first red flag is that nobody has really given me a straight answer as to why exactly Web3 is going to be a net positive for me or for society. They tend to espouse some idealism about democratization and decentralization without grounding it in any kind of real-world application.
That’s all well and good. And to be clear, I believe in the technology. I know the technology. I believe that the blockchain and crypto and all that stuff has the potential to be a democratizing and decentralizing force in the world. But that idealism doesn’t square with the reality of what’s actually happening on the ground.
On the ground, Silicon Valley investors and VCs and private equity are pouring billions of dollars into Web3 start ups. Coinbase is a publicly traded company who will be first and foremost responsible to it’s shareholders. FTX is headquartered in the Bahamas, a favorite money haven of the rich and powerful seeking to shelter money from their governments (sounds a lot like Web2, huh? )These companies didn’t spend millions of dollars on the most expensive commercial blocks money can because of idealism. They did it because the sooner Web3 gets off the ground the sooner they start to see a return on their investment.
The reality for the Jimmies and Joes out there is that the game is already lost. Capital (with a capital C) has already thrown it’s financial weight behind the success of Web3. Which means that Web3, like Web2, will simply be swallowed whole by capitalism. Which is precisely why Web2 sucks ass and everyone is pining for something different.
Why does everyone hate Web2? It’s simple. Capitalism has bled into every facet of the internet, rendering it virtually unusable for the average consumer. Your entire experience on the internet of Web2 is predicated on someone making money off of that experience. It’s not user focused because the the internet is no longer for the user. It’s just a mechanism designed to capture information about you.
Social media is just one massive surveillance operation, cloaked in memes and racist grandmas, designed to collect data about you to sell you more stuff. All the troves of information available on the internet comes at the price of letting Google use your searches and browsing habits to build a psychological dossier on you to, you guessed it, sell you more stuff. You pay content aggregators (Spotify, Netflix, etc) a small fee to merely access content, not own it, even though they have unlimited copies of that content. Seems like one way or another everything is just a cleverly designed way to get you to watch ads or buy a subscription to something.
What’s going to make Web3 any different? It’s not like companies are just going to give up trying to make money off of you, they are just going to do it in a different way. And what’s worse is that they are going to turn the democratizing and decentralizing aspects of Web3 right on it’s head.
One aspect of Web3 that holds so much promise for me is the idea that we can own our own data. All the data we generate while online, the stuff companies like Facebook and Google have made billions of dollars capturing and selling, is now in our hands.
But the reality is that most people either don’t give a shit or don’t understand how much their data is worth. So on Web3 users will sell it to some personal information broker that essentially buys and sells the data you generate, taking a percentage. Or, users will forfeit it because buried in the end-user license agreement will be some legalese that says in order to access Instagram on Web3 you will forfeit all rights to the data you generate while on the platform. So the decentralization will be rendered moot in favor of convenience. A key tactic in the war on your privacy is the simple idea that people will take the path of least resistance, so if you make it difficult enough to use platforms and services without capitulating to your terms, eventually enough people will surrender.
The emergence of NFTs has been an interesting development in terms of how content will be bought and sold and distributed on the new internet of Web3. In an ideal world artists and creators will own the rights to all their own content and fans can pay them directly for their creations, cutting out the leeching middlemen platforms like Spotify and Netflix.
But managing all that technology is going to be a pain in the ass, especially for less technical people. It will be a logistical nightmare for artists and creators who want to be focused on their art. So eventually some company will come around and, for a fee, handle all that logistical and technical bullshit. They will host the content, collect the fees from fans, take their cut (of course), and distribute the earnings back to the artists. Wait… what the fuck?! We’ve just re-created Spotify on Web3!
Or imagine this fucking nightmare: Let’s say you’re an emerging artist and create a bunch of super cool NFTs (we’re not at the nightmare yet). Imagine some pervert at an art rights clearing house, basically a company that buys the exclusive rights to NFT art, buys all your NFTs for $2,000. Wow! What a payday! Then the guy licenses them out to some t-shirt company. Suddenly everyone is wearing t-shirts with your art on them, and art clearing house guy is making a fortune, but because you didn’t set up a smart contract granting you royalties when you sold that NFT, all you have is the measly $2,000.
How about this: You are an amateur photographer and manage to snap an unflattering picture of Beyonce during the Super Bowl Halftime show. Since the picture exists on the blockchain, and you are its sole owner and proprietor, anyone who wants to use that picture has to pay you a nickel. Hooray! The picture goes viral and is meme’d over and over. But Beyonce doesn’t like this, so she offers to buy the rights to the photo from you so she can delete it forever. Do you have a responsibility to yourself to make a fuck ton of money? Do you have a responsibility to society and culture to let that meme live on? Is it ok that if you have enough money and power you can literally delete things from the internet?
I know that these are all basically worst-case scenarios I’ve created for effect. But the point is that I’m 10x smarter than most of you about the blockchain (no offense, dear reader, I do data and tech for a living) and this is some of the worst shit I can imagine. Now imagine a company like Facebook with a fucking army of geeks who are 100x smarter and more evil than I am with this stuff, and a million lawyers and accountants at their disposal, run by a fucking creep like Zuckerberg who wants nothing more than to wring every single cent out of his users no matter the cost. Thus, the metaverse is born.
The metaverse and it’s complimentary products are perhaps the most perverse development of capitalism we have ever seen. Thanks to capitalism we (Americans at least) live in a neo-feudalistic hellscape, terrified of our neighbors and without upward mobility, on a dying planet we can’t escape. Capitalism has literally run out of things to swallow IRL. It swallowed politics and science and culture, and now all of those things exist to serve it. It swallowed the fucking earth! And now we live on a dying planet where oil companies still have trillion dollar market caps.
Real life on earth has become so shitty that the siren song of the metaverse, at first, seems pretty attractive. Even to people who watched Ready Player One. Come to the metaverse, where you can be whoever you want and do whatever you want! Sounds pretty good to me. But the moment a critical mass of people decide that life in the fictional metaverse is just as important as life in the real world, we might as well just turn the Matrix on and run ourselves a sustenance goo bath. I digress.
So now that capitalism has swallowed and digested and shat out every single facet of real life, it must turn it’s sights to a completely fictional and made up digital life. It has to create fake shit like the metaverse and NFTs to maintain the illusion. People have been so seduced by the cult of capitalism that they have convinced themselves that these inherently worthless and useless bits of ephemera actually do have value.
It’s really a mass delusion when you think about it. Someone paid $100 for this thing we all agree is worthless, so it must be worth that much because someone paid $100 for it. The circular logic is disorienting to the uncritical eye and only exposes the contradiction at the core of economics and market theory: that the market is not a “logical” organism governed by reason, it is just an imperfect measurement of chaos and irrationality. Nobody can give you a rational reason why a jpeg of an ape is worth a million dollars, yet some doofus somewhere paid a million dollars for it.
I guess what I’m getting hung up on here is why? Is anyone actually asking for this “revolution”, or is it being foisted upon us by the people who have a vested interest in everyone buying in? People act like it’s a foregone conclusion that Web3 is coming, and that the sooner everyone buys in the quicker we can start living in this idyllic new world.
Just look at all those Super Bowl ads and the media at large, and the message we keep getting drilled into our brains (because advertising works) is that all the cool people (Larry David, Matt Damon, Tom Brady) are already doing it. All we see everywhere is stories about how some dipshit in middle America made a million dollars trading shitcoins, and about how some worthless NFT ape is actually worth millions of dollars, and that all these athletes and entertainers are actually being paid in crypto.
The only coherent reason anyone can give me as to why any of this is a good idea is that it can make them money. And right there is how you know it’s all a fucking illusion. Because any sort of high minded ideals about democracy and decentralization and shifting power dynamics are immediately thwarted by the reality that it’s only inherent usefulness as a technology is making money.
At least Web1 and Web2 were founded on the thesis that connectivity and togetherness and community could help create a more empathetic, more efficient, and more liberal world. And at the beginning it was in fact doing all those things, before capital set its sights on it.
I suppose part of it is that most people alive today missed the boat on making money in the wild west era of the internet. All the apps have been invented, all the scams have been scammed, all the unicorns have been discovered. So your average Web3 advocate is looking to get in on the ground floor of the next phase of the internet, which has the potential to be incredibly lucrative.
But the money you make on the margins flipping NFTs or trading Bitcoin volatility will pale in comparison to the money Capital will be raking in, and it will only further entrench everything wrong and terrible about technology. It will be the same unfair bullshit dressed up in some fancy new clothes.