Web3’s core values and Cyberspace’s ideological war

“Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. New technologies compete with old ones for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world view.”

— — Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

I have great respect for Professor Bosman, who was one of the pioneers of the Media Ecology. This sentence comes from his book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology in the 1990s, and now it seems that this very forward-looking point of view is being validated by a web revolution called Web3.

I believe most people familiar with Web3 are attracted by the crazy wealth effect, heavy investment is making this market look like a new world full of gold. But at the same time, I hope you can think carefully about a question: what is the core value of Web3? Is it the low-cost financial services enabled by cryptocurrencies? Is it the privacy protection brought by asymmetric encryption? Or the so-called redistribution of network ownership? The answer to this question will greatly affect your actions in Web3, and thus affect the future evolution direction, so it is worth thinking about carefully.

What is the context for the Web3 debate?

In fact, the debate on the value of Web3 continues to this day, and even making a clear definition of Web3 is a very challenging thing. So before we start discussing this question, let’s sift through some representative points to create a consistent context for the following narrative.

First for Web3 supporters, here are three more recognized answers, the first one is from Josh Stack, who works for ethereum foundation, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies:

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.

The second one is from Chris Dixon, who is the general partner of a16z, which is considered to be Web3’s largest investment institution:

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 one is from Thomas Stackpole, senior editor for Harvard Business Review, which is one of the most influential publications in the international business world:

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 extract two key conclusions. 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 distribution paradigm of control., which emphasizes the autonomy and independence of users in the web world.

A very classic Web3 example is in the Web3 world where users will retake ownership of their digital assets from third-party platforms. Taking the classic Web2 company Twitter as an example, since the data generated by users in the process of use is exclusively owned by the platform, it can use this data to seek benefits through the advertising-driven revenue model, but in fact, these values should belong to users, who is the data producer, 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.

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Under the guidance of such a vision, it seems that the design principles of the Web3 project have been formed. In the official website of Ethereum, which is regarded as the most representative Web3 infrastructure, we can find the following:

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, the opponents of Web3 are not to be outdone. Similarly, we choose three representative views. The first one comes from Moxie Marlinspike, the creator 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 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 is doubts about the significance of the decentralized network. They believe that decentralization is basically a pseudo-demand for Web users. Compared with decentralization, users are more concerned about the efficiency of Web application information interaction or other, and from the results, many so-called Web3 companies do not actually implement this principle, but just borrow the marketing effect behind it.

The second is the suspicion of Web3’s infrastructure, the technical flaws of the blockchain, they believe that the blockchain is a failure as a “distributed database” technology, because this invention does not improve the efficiency of query and insertion, and it is even a serious regression, and this indicator is usually an important technical indicator for evaluating database technology.

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The third is doubts about the current status of Web3’s hyper-financialization. They usually affirm the meaning of decentralization, but they believe that the current Web3 is overly dependent on encryption technology, which has led to Web3 falling into the dilemma of hyper-financialization. On the one hand, it makes it difficult for the entire industry. Escape from the law of the economic cycle, the monopoly of funds on the two sides will lead to the re-concentration of power distribution.

The above information is basically a review of the development status of Web3. You will find that the key to resolving disputes is to figure out what the core value of Web3 is. I think the answer is that the emergence of Web3 marks the maturity of Cyberspace (or a fashionable concept to replace it, that is Metaverse), The proportion of web actions in human social life is increasing, and Web3 provides us with a relatively complete cyberspace’s ideology theory and practical technical solutions. From now on, ideology will become a new reference dimension for future web technology development together. All in all, the core value of Web3 lies in its cultural value.

Three Stages of Cyberspace Development

Cyberspace is an old concept, the name first appeared in the artwork of Danish artist Susanne Ussing as early as 1960, however due to the term and now There is a big gap, so we will not introduce too much. Until Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, the concept of this term was gradually transformed into as we are familiar, it is a “sense of a social setting that exists purely within a space of representation and communication … it exists entirely within a computer space, distributed across increasingly complex and fluid networks.”

In fact, I think Web technology’s development 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 Cyberspace people, We can roughly divide this process into three stages (sorry that the Web + Serial number doesn’t adequately express my point, so I chose other naming standards):

(1) Classical liberalism 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, it is inseparable from the popularization of the first generation of MPC released by Microsoft (Multimedia PC, multimedia personal computer standard)). With the help of this information system, which is accessed through the Internet and composed of many interconnected hypertexts, we have realized the ultra-long-distance, high-speed and low-cost transmission of information.

Thanks to the relatively free political environment and the boom of globalization at that time, we completed the construction of the underlying technology 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 company or country. It is similar to the characteristics of the physical world. It is a neutral network infrastructure.

At this point anyone can use three simple technologies: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to use the Web for low-frequency information exchange (Recalling the experience in the era of personal blogs and emails), Cyberspace people are usually peers, both network builders and network users, the process of information exchange directly depends on open protocols, and everyone can use Web technology to publish and obtain information at their own will. So we call this phase is the Classical liberalism Era.

However, along with ethical issues in the cyberspace, such as extortion, drugs sales, child pornography, etc., the government has stepped up its censorship of online content. At this stage, the main contradiction in the cyberspace lies in the contradiction between the principle of open protocols and government’s censorship. Most cyberspace people believe that personal freedom is the premise of web’s development, and excessive censorship seriously violates the openness principle.

Many Technolibertarianism and institutions appeared during this stage, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” is a symbolic product of this stage. These Silicon Valley left-wing elites usually have certain demands for politics. However, due to the fact that the development of the Cyberspace is still in the early stage, the proportion of Web actions in the social life of the people is small, there are less people who agree with it, so it is not smooth. In fact, at the time, web was just a tool for quickly transmitting information to most people, and it was not much different from the phone.

(2) Technological Monopoly Era

Next, Cyberspace has entered a stage of rapid technological development. The

evolution is basically going in two directions. One is to expand the types of information that the Web can carry, and to bring people a more realistic information interaction experience, such as Websocket, AJax, Streaming Media, etc. The second is to reduce 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 web, it becomes more difficult to master all the technologies, not only because of the quantity but also the complexity. According to the difference of motivation, cyberspace people can be roughly divided into two categories: web users and technology suppliers. Among them, web users pay more attention to information exchange through the network, and technology suppliers hope to obtain benefits by providing low-cost and efficient technical services or tools to web users. At this time, the information exchange gradually depends on the technical services provided by technology suppliers. Therefore, we call this phase is the technology monopoly era.

At this time, a large number of Web technology companies attracted technical experts through high salaries, hoping to achieve technological monopoly and obtain monopoly profits. This process reached its peak after the emergence of social media applications and advertising-driven revenue model. Through the introduction of advertisers, a seemingly win-win relationship between network users, technology suppliers and advertisers has been formed.

As the number of cyberspace people has become huge, the categories of information have become abundant, and the proportion of web actions in people’s social life has increased, these made the negative impact of privacy information leakage and illegal monitoring more serious. The Snowden incident completely detonated the bomb, and the main contradiction in the cyberspace gradually shifted to the contradiction between web users and technology oligarchs. The root of the contradiction lies in the issue of data privacy.

Some technical experts believe that the key reason for the privacy problem is that the technology oligopoly monopolizes all network resources and makes profits by monopolizing the information of network users, which is an intolerable thing. So the current mainstream web architecture need to be completely changed, people need a web architecture with full disclosure and no monopoly. In fact, this is Gavin Wood’s original Web 3.0 vision, which is a description of the “post-Snowden 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 used a more complete ideological perspective to think about web’s development and guide the development of web technology. In fact, it looks like an anarchist-directed cyberspace. Until then, technology evolution has revolved mainly around cost optimization and efficiency improvements.

(3) Ideology Cyberspace Era

In order to avoid confusion with cyber political philosophy, the first thing that needs to be explained is that the ideology here refers to a philosophy of web construction and does not involve political pursuits in the physics society. I think we have now entered the Ideology Cyberspace Era. The main feature of this era is that cyberspace has gained enough recognition as an important part of human social life. The new ideology (or web construction philosophy) and the corresponding management system design will provide a new driving force for the development of web technology. Since then, the cyberspace will be divided by ideology, while maintaining weak connections.

In this era, the cyberspace’s development is unlikely along an exclusive single-threaded path, that’s why I don’t like the name Web3. The situation will be very similar to the political philosophy development of the Renaissance, but this time, the open protocol spirit of the internet infrastructure will determine that this is a bottom-up development process, as building a new network society is a low-cost thing that does not require violent revolution. The ideology and management system of cyberspace will increase over time, and different cyberspace will attract the migration of cyberspace people through their own unique advantages.

The Leftward Movement of the Cyber-Ideology-Spectrum and the Wave of Cyberspace Migration

With this in mind, let’ s try to review existed Cyber-ideologies(more detailed analysis in a follow-up article):

* Classical liberal cyberspace: This is a web construction philosophy that supports speech freedom above all else, and believes that excessive censorship will have a negative impact on the web’s development.Therefore, these builders usually advocate the establishment of neutral network infrastructure based on open principles.

* Techno-authoritarian cyberspace: This is a practical-oriented web construction philosophy, which believes that the so-called cyberspace is only a product provided by technology owners to non-technology owners. The core appeal of these builders is to provide rich functions and high performance network for commercial gain.

* Anarchist cyberspace: This is a web construction philosophy based on the principle of opposing all authoritarianism, including technical authoritarianism and political authoritarianism. It believes that no centralized organization or technical solution can bring about a fair cyberspace. Therefore, this part of network construction Authors typically build network infrastructure with decentralization principles (I think it is appropriate to use anarchist to describe the vision of a post-Snowden version of Web3).

* Liberal capitalist cyberspace: This is a monetization and marketization-led cyberspace construction philosophy. It believes that private ownership of digital assets and an unregulated free market are at the heart of building a fairer cyberspace.

These builders advocate for the distribution of power in cyberspace by designing a rational cryptocurrency-based monetary policy and economic system (I think it is appropriate to describe the vision of a hyper-financialized Web3).

We cannot predict what novel ideological cyberspace will emerge in the future, or which Ideology will emerge victorious in this grand battle, but I think it makes sense to propose an analytical framework at this time. Cyber-Ideology-Spectrum, similar to the political spectrum map, can not only realize the initial positioning of an cyber-ideology, but also locate the ideological tendency of cyberspace people, and then judge the direction of future development.

Cyber-Ideology-Spectrum

As shown in the figure, the horizontal axis represents the degree of immersion in Cyberspace. The further the position is to the left, the higher the proportion of the online world in social life and the greater the degree of dependence on the cyberspace. It is generally considered that the extreme left group is the so-called cyber-punks. They think that they live completely in the cyberspace, while the far-right people are so-called cyber-instrumentalists. They believe that the online world does not exist at all, and that the Internet is just a tool for delivering information. The vertical axis represents the classic political and cultural axis (Authority versus Libertarian).

Under such a setting, you will see the distribution of the above-mentioned ideological cyberspace. It can be seen that a left-leaning trend is taking place. I think this trend will further intensify with the development of immersive web technologies such as VR, AR, Metaverse, etc. It is believed that in the near future, we will experience a shocking wave of immigration of Internet residents. The only certainty is that the ideological superiority is the key factor in winning this ideological struggle, whether it is a high return on investment, a stronger sense of product participation, or an excellent privacy protection scheme.