Web3 Separatism

I had a dream of an evolutionary path toward decentralization as if technology could replace the wrongs and offer a smooth transition to a more inclusive, horizontal governance model of the web and the ruling systems we live in.

We hear all these blame about the slow speed of the corporations adopting innovations or government bureaucracies barricading themselves to maintain the status quo and waiting for individuals to drive the change and gradually shift the ball — but there are very few, if non, distributed ledger use-cases with traditional systems leveraging the tech in a proper and promising way.

It took me time and multiple interactions with Govtech and Corptech to understand that the entire web3/crypto revolution is not an extending solution to current systems. On the contrary, it’s an alien threat to their very foundation principles.

Web3 is a different branch of thinking — it’s like an other-dimensional world that pop-ed in parallel and is incompatible with the path our current internet interactions are built on. It’s like a system of “Perestroika” in the Soviet 80ies. You couldn’t cohabitate a capitalistic foundation of free speech and democratic principles with a state-controlled economy and no ownership rights. Individual freedom is gonna flip it in the long-term, and that’s what gets neglected in most cases, but momentum is building up:

Web3 has its separate believers, a generation growing only knowing that ownership comes in the form of a self-custody, with the risk of losing a key or what some might describe as the hard UX of interacting with apps. But the notion of ownership is greater than the value of just surfing the web, and most of the tries to bring these “ownership bits” into existing frameworks will be a failed experiment because:

Web3 only exists if its outcome is:
+ Empowerment of an individual with data and value ownership
+ Dissintermidiation of the market
+ Obstracting the way to form digital authoritarianism or tech oligopoly

It does not matter who we are trying to pitch (Government, corporation, or a platform) — we’re pushing them for either governance, business model, or customer value shift. Each transformation has a measurable metric that is inconsistent with its current life form:

Business model:
How can we expect any platform to cut its commission fees from an average of 40% to the web3 standard of 2,5% and disintermediate itself from monetizing the creator’s content?! such a scheme would only work in a self-destructive scenario.

It’s immature to expect content distribution platforms to value individual ownership or non-fungibility of an object — as it means more value dissemination towards keepers, more profit re-distribution — the fact that for the 1 year of its existence, NFTs distributed $3,9bn to 22,400 creators. At the same time, Spotify divided nearly the same amount among 11 million artists, showing a glimpse of the dawn of the platform economies as we know it.

Governance shift:

We can’t pitch distributed architectures and expect systems to let go of their monopolies in the form of power or data. With the internet, it’s straightforward that each user is a data set, monetized and re-sold for commercial purposes. Advertising is the currency of the current web that pays off for users' free access. With individual data ownership, we’re breaking down the system's flywheel.

Web3 is not just another technology that will cause the shift of capital from outdated corporations to lean startups — but due to its different nature of value re-distribution to creators and early believers, the innovation vertical will shift as well, and only with the bottom-up approach, the system will evolve and become sustainable.

Now imagine the same principles pitched to the state about the paradigm shift to decentralized governance and inclusion — The very nature of why the state was created to act in most cases as an only source of “truth” becomes obsolete, and now we have a distributed ledger system that can keep the social consensus intact, enforceable and less corrupt.

If we zoom out, it’s the same story of the business model threat, making the system unsustainable and pushing for self-destruction. So the chances of a merging two worlds in a symbiuotic manner are doomed to failure.

Web3 is a new dimensional space built on notions that are more of a threat to the existing web than a solution. So every feature comparison is irrelevant as we are not comparing apples with apples, nor do the users share the same expectation or values of these worlds. Web3 is an uncharted territory of experiments and individuals trying to re-calibrate their interactions across the web. Invent completely new business models to grow sustainable network effects and just give us a choice of a different digital existence in a more “responsible” way!