WEB3 is (probably not) Bullshit
The following are arguments picked from some of the healthiest skepticism of web3 and crypto in general. (a.k.a. those detecting problems in the current web ecosystem and rejecting a pure capitalistic self-burning society).
I then add a personal rebate to them.
Web3 Skeptics Say:
Yes, the internet is rotten because of big platform monopolies that farm profit from consumer behavior and heartlessly manipulate it towards maximizing their own goals which are radically local, polarising, and degenerative. Profit-seeking at scale, in an ecosystem where profit is independent of human outcome, is poisonous.
Web3 Skeptics Solutions:
Let’s build better community governance and regulations that don’t allow the flourishing of those monopolies, but don’t create cryptos and blockchains which create a financial product out of everything. This only makes the case of unhealthy profit-seeking worse.
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The WEB3 Stand
If the policy control is given to regulators (who have many tools to act on their own interests different to the community’s, despite current democratic systems), and this power is not independent of money and currently motivated profit, you don’t avoid platform monopoly, you only transfer it to the higher spheres, and will eventually infiltrate back to all industries.
Instead, change the incentive for profit from the ground up: construct a value infrastructure that rewards community growth, by also issuing profit when taking care of the whole.
How?
Not by directly enforcing a change on the product or the motivations behind it, nor by infantilizing society lifting their “burden” of responsibility, but by encouraging freedom of decision, and making it ultimately too expensive to not be globally altruistic. Optimizing the social and trade infrastructure by ensuring its safety, stability, and effectiveness, replacing policymakers and keepers with trustless, verifiable technology, and a network of free commercial transactions based on currencies that transport the community’s main values in its ethos, and represent the structural health of the whole society.
Tokenizing economies is not meant to magnify individual profit-driven dynamics that capitalize at all costs from communities, it means creating and using new value currencies that are not detached from society’s values, but do separate power from value, making it safe to transact without compromising trust, and making it impossible to profit individually without standing for the whole network. Tokens and cryptocurrencies are not an instrument for further societal detachment, but a necessary incentive layer to translate the power from individuals to collectives.
In this vision, centralizing practices don’t need to be surveilled, thus they are bound to die economically. Trust is released from policymakers, eradicating monopolies at any layer, and profit is stimulated in a holistic manner.
It does come with some compromises:
The need for self-custody and responsibility, and the need to take decisions, as belonging to a community now would imply a direct choice of values through trade.
Web3 promotes trading, but it completely changes its definition. Trading becomes a signal for choice, desire, evolution, self-awareness, and community.
That’s my current vision.