What’s a better Internet?

Many people will say: Web3.

It’s so viral that you simply can’t avoid it. The reason why I write about it isn’t to freeload, but to discuss something serious. I want to help you understand: What is Web3? Why is it emerging now? What criticism does it face?

Coinbase, one of the best crypto exchanges, once explained in an article, “Web3’s defining feature is ownership. Whereas the first iteration of the commercial Internet (Web 1.0) was read-only for most users, and Web 2.0 allowed users to both read and write on centralized platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc), Web3 gives users full ownership over their content, data, and assets via blockchains. It empowers users to read-write-own.”

This explanation is fair but not complete because it implies that Web3 is blockchain-based innovation. However, Web3 didn’t emerge out of a sudden. It came into being via evolving narratives and ideas. Even to some extent, Web3 is exactly what the Internet pioneers aspired to build decades ago. We must trace back the history of the current Internet to understand Web3.

Internet in its origins

The open-source software movement and the hacker culture are nourishing today’s Internet. The pioneers believe that the Internet can help build a decentralized, equal and liberal society. However, when the computer was first invented and the Internet just dawned, computer science had a completely different meaning to the society back then.

Computer made a quite negative impression on the public because of its direct association with wars. Scientific researchers at the early stage of the Cold War were concerned that governments and capitalists would use computer as a manipulation tool and social institutions would fall prey.

Starting from the late 1950s, many scientists and philosophers began to oppose the "automated processes" represented by computers. In his book The Myth of the Machine (1967), Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), one of the most acknowledged anti-automationists in the 1960s, stated,  “With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.”

The Cold War era was shadowed by nuclear weapons. A new world war might befall at any time. When young people had to face the danger of being killed every day, they would instinctively contemplate about the purpose of self-existence. Also, it was a time of alienation - young people felt like cogs of the intricate machine known as social institution. They were programmed to follow the societal path - getting married, buying a property, having kids, getting a dog, and checking in all the other clearly defined “places of interest” before death. However, some decided to defy the norms and break with the pipelined society to resolve the everyday banalities. As a result, the Hippie Movement, a counterculture movement, was born. A flock of hippies long to build a society where everyone lives an equal life, and many decentralized, self-governing organizations sprouted up, building tens of thousands of independent communes outside the cities based on religious beliefs, political orientations and sexualities. The contemporary American writer Fred Turner called these contrarians the “New Communalists”.

Though these New Communalists lived far from the city, they didn’t abandon modern lifestyles. They wanted to be producers and creators. They used all kinds of tools to build a convenient, communal environment. The heavy usage of tools made the communalists not at all tech-averse - at least less tech-averse than advocates in other social movements. Meanwhile, building a community from scratch required intense collaboration. The Communalists realized that computer automation could facilitate the collaboration. If used wisely, computer would serve not just the privileged, but the masses.

The discussion around tools began to gain attention. How to pick the right tool to finish the right task became a fad. To improve the communication about tools, Stewart Brand (1938-) founded Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972). He operated the magazine as an open-source software developer - making accounts public, recommending various kinds of tools, and exchanging information with the Communalists.

For example, a 20-pound hammer. As one reader shared, “When I walked into the bathroom with a new 20-ounce hammer in my hand, I suddenly understood what the Whole Earth Catalog called ‘tools’. I had always thought of tools as physical objects like screwdrivers, wrenches, axes, and hoes. Now I know a tool is a process - using an object of the right size and the right shape to get a job done in the most efficient way.”

During the same period, computer began to downsize from being room-sized to desktop. Many Communalists started to think whether computer could empower individuals to produce and create. As a result, the term “personal computer” came up in the early 1970s.

The computer narrative changed from “the tool owned by social institutions” to “the tool that every individual can own”.

In June 1971, Brand held a farewell party for the Whole Earth Catalog. At the party, Brand passed $20,000 to the host, and the host said to the guests, “This is exactly a tool that can be catalogued in the Whole Earth Catalog.” They wanted to discuss how to spend the money, however, despite the fifty-some proposals that the guests raised, no agreement was reached. After the party, the rest of money was given to Frederick L. Moore (1941-1997). In the spring of 1975, Moore founded the Homebrew Computer Club.

Time Magazine called the Homebrew Computer Club “the melting pot of the whole computer time”. This club also inspired Apple being founded by Steve Jobs (1955-2011) and Steve Wozniak (1950-). So logically, the zeitgeist of anti-bureaucracy and civil liberty was infused into the publicity of Apple Macintosh in 1984 – at least Steve Jobs himself was strongly motivated by the New Communalists.

These pioneers’ quests for equality, liberty, personal empowerment and tool utilization were the brainwaves of their times, which set the scene for the advent of the Internet. In a 1995 special issue of the Time Magazine, Brand asserted, “The personal computer revolution and the Internet had grown directly out of the coutnerculture…Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair. The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.” To them, computer transformed from a giant machine locked in a room to a personal tool - it was historic.

At that particular moment, the computer narrative completely changed. Computer started to belong to everybody.

So now when we trace the origin of cyberculture, we are led to find the same group of people - a group of hippies that lived under the shadow of the nuclear war, against the bureaucracy and in the communes, and their followers. Their goal was to reconfigure a part of the world so that the society could value equality, allow the free flow of information, and make everyone live up to their own beliefs. It led to a decentralized, individualistic utopia. Humanity is the goal, not the means.

Although these goals have never been fulfilled, they became the driving force of every new cybercultural movement after the information revolution - every new wave claimed to be more centred on personal empowerment and benefits than before. In retrospect, these movements maintain considerably high degrees of ideological consistency. This is a lasting dream for generations.

Internet Shaped by Web 2.0

The Web is probably the most significant product since the invention of the personal computer. A generation of tech pioneers had high hopes for the Internet, believing that it could pave the way for an ideal digital utopia. From this point onwards, information began to shift from the atomic world to the bit world. In 1992, a librarian coined the phrase “surfing the Internet”. It perfectly describes there will be waves only if there is a constant flow of information.

However, at the time, the Internet was more of a one-way information stream. Not many users were able to build their own personal websites from scratch. People not familiar with the Web thought of it simply as another form of print media. At the end of the day, the Web only served a small crowd, just as most of the New Communalists were affluent, white middle-class Americans.

So there came Web 2.0. A new concept that allows users to interact with each other and to create content rather than just passively consume it. My first encounter with the Internet happened before the burst of Dot-com bubble - I didn’t even understand the meaning of “bubble” at that time. When I began to project part of my life onto the Internet, Web 2.0 was still in its infancy; and it was originally introduced to me via an article in a print magazine. The concept seemed so organic, and I had faith that it would come to fruition. Since I was a child, no one took my thoughts seriously in real life, except on the Internet where I used pseudonyms. This was the reason that I had a positive outlook on the Internet, and it’s also the inspiration that made me think why the Internet had been different before.

Evidently, what I thought of had some limitations. My pure desire was to connect with people whom I couldn’t meet face-to-face. O'Reilly and Media International, which brought Web 2.0 to the public eye, believed that the Internet would facilitate a more democratic, decentralized distribution of information. According to Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, Web 2.0 can be characterized with three features: interactivity enabled by Ajax technology, democracy, and “don’t maltreat users”.

It’s obvious that democracy and empowerment emanated from the inventors of the Internet. However, in the wake of Web 2.0, a new narrative arose: the Internet didn’t just gather cohorts of individuals, but summoned platforms as service providers. These service providers shouldn’t “maltreat the users”. They should build a playground for everyone to create content.

Back then, no one suspected platforms would be a problem. On the contrary, platforms should be more favorable to users, because democracy embedded in the Internet enables a more user-friendly, interactive experience. The bible of the Internet’s product development was Don’t Make Me Think (2000), and the title of its Chinese version was literally Turn A Stone Into Gold: How To Design A Visitor-Oriented Webpage? (2006). As recently as 2015, when a wave of ventures arose in China, this book was still recommended as a must-read for budding entrepreneurs. It was seen as a principle that platform builders should ensure users had nothing to worry about and could simply rely on it.

While Pandora unintentionally opened her box, we intentionally opened ours.

Internet giants formed network effects via massive user data, and gained a monopoly over our cyber lives. Their products appeared to be free, yet they are nonetheless expensive in terms of data exploitation, as “users are the real products - products to be sold to advertisers”. Using data, platforms can deliver more targeted ads to individuals and even influence their thinking. The relationship between user, platform and advertiser is the “triangular trade” of our time.

More importantly, creators who contribute the bulk of content on the Internet are almost never compensated fairly for their efforts. They produce a lot yet get very little in return. The needs of platforms, advertisers and product managers always take precedence over those of creators. It’s not uncommon for the platforms to demand creators to grant them perpetual licensing to their work. Aaron Hillel Swartz (1986-2013), the inventor of RSS and Markdown, even paid the ultimate price for recovering the rights of creators.

Therefore, Web 2.0’s demise is just like that of Web 1.0. Platforms do help users engage more freely, but they also steal more than what they give. Early adopters of the Internet are like Prometheus snatching fire from the earth’s fire source; however, platforms suspend Prometheus’ account, claiming he has violated the user agreement.

Who is the rightful owner of user data? What is the best way to distribute the profits? Does it make sense to have too-big-to-fail platforms?

These are some of the most fundamental questions to be addressed in today’s Internet. The most typical responses to such inquiries are that technology is a double-edged sword, and that its effectiveness depends on how we utilize it. Both sound like misrepresentations to me, because people who complain about the flavor of their apple pie shouldn’t be intuitively blamed for eating it incorrectly. Although the Internet is wonderful, we have to recognize that not all progress treats users fairly.

If you are also concerned about these challenges, now it’s the time to talk about the so-called “Web3”.

Web3: The New Narrative

New concepts are always full of exciting possibilities, and Web3 is no exception to this rule. Despite its presumably complex nature, Web3 just pivots around the relationship between data, ownership, and users.

Who should own user data and the value that users have created? What is the best way to define the legitimacy of the ownership? If users should control their own data, who owns the platform data? How should the platform be run if it belongs to everyone? Which currency should be used for revenue settlement?

These are the questions that Web3 is trying to answer.

Web3 aims to better connect consumers with their data, content and monetization opportunities via blockchain. Users must give their permissions first, before a platform accesses their data. Users can also claim ownership of the platform. Users, employees and investors then become not only unique “shareholders” but also distinct identities of the same person. Since users own their data, it will be much easier for them to migrate from one platform to another, and so will decentralization. Meanwhile, crypto, as the best-known blockchain application, ties all of this to monetization.

Critics can argue that not all of Web3’s solutions are perfect, but they can’t deny the gravity of the challenge that Web3 is trying to address.

However, no societal issues raised by one technology can be resolved by another. Inertia is a human trait. New technology should show its differentiations, before gaining trust from users. Web3 isn’t just about technological innovation, it’s also renovating the narrative of the Web.  Perhaps even some of the Web3’s evangelists haven’t realized that what they advocate is never the tech, but its legitimacy. Technology can’t endorse itself, it has to be endorsed. It's about the "dominant discourse" per se[1].

The world we’re living in is built on Web 2.0 and moulded by the narrative of Web 2.0. If you are an entrepreneur, you would probably believe in “the lean startup principles” and “fast iteration” to generate “the network effect” and build a “platform”. Also, you may agree that “measuring data means improving data”, “everyone should think like a product manager”, “data is the new oil”, and “recommender systems benefit content distribution”.

All of this is what we call the “Internet thinking” in Mandarin. It wasn’t invented by Web 2.0, but was carried forward by Web 2.0 and its epoch. It became the Internet Gospel, or the axiom in the Internet world. I’m not criticizing it, but it is indeed something that can’t be questioned or altered.

Entrepreneurs never say to investors that they don’t want the “network effect”; developers never refuse “fast iteration”; nobody ever questions the value of data. This narrative is the “mental seal”[2] by the Internet.

Until this narrative, flourished by Web 2.0, started to crack off. Web3 is like the black ships in the Perry Expedition, making Web 2.0’s ports open. It also makes everyone who has become accustomed to the Web 2.0 narrative question whether their habits are correct - all habits must be “corrected” in this process.

Is the network effect the fate of the Internet?

Does the Internet have to choose from the only two exits - becoming a platform or joining a platform?

Do users only have the right of use, not the right of ownership?

Though more data is always better, is it better for the platforms or the users?

When the Web 2.0 narrative started to break down, new ideas about the Internet began to emerge. By pivoting concepts that we are accustomed to, we can revive our creativity towards the Internet. The Web3 narrative is revolutionizing the Web 2.0’s. Even using “Web 3” instead of “Web 3.0” is part of the narrative - Web3 isn’t the upgraded Web 2.0, but rather, it should be something new.

Web3 isn’t just about technology; it’s a big thing that extends to sophisticated technologies and exhilarating ideas. Should we first talk about distributed storage, NFT, and decentralization, or how to build a better Internet? We have two paths to cover - technological and ideological. The ideological is different from the technological, since it’s inspired by technology, but it always shows a considerable “lead time”. Often, it’s only when a problem with technology has occurred that we begin to think about the real problems that we aim to resolve. At the same time, among all the technological problems, which one to be prioritized is an ideological problem. Technological advances lead to ideological shifts, and ideological shifts further technological advances - this is a social cycle with many examples in history.

Part 2:

[1]: Dominant discourse refers to the most prevalent concepts or expressions when we think of the Internet, for instance, "data is the king", "big platforms", "recommender systems", etc.

[2]: The "mental seal" is from the Three-Body Problem, the Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. If people are mental-sealed, they will never change their perspectives on certain things. Some can be mental-sealed to an extreme, so much so that they can't even realize the existence of the mental seal.

This is the first part of this article, in the next part I will discuss the relationship between technological progress and ideas, as well as some criticisms of web 3.

Thanks to NK, exuberantLiu, and Mohan Wang for helping me to translate. Thanks to Mohan Wang for editing.

Banner pic by mamiya7.eth

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