I do not understand the intricacies and technical aspects web3 well, but I do believe I have a decent zoomed-out larger picture of it all. My perspective on it was formed by working in a tech-art focused residency during the NFT boom. I witnessed a ton of artists earn eye-watering amounts of money from selling NFT’s (some of it genuinely interesting art), which was cool in that they are tech artists who might not have been able to sell their work in a traditional sense as easily, thus doing away with the disadvantage that an artist with more tangible work might not face. That’s cool, right?

Then come the rise of artist from the likes of Beeple or the Bored Apes or Crypto Punks, all giving me the notion that NFT’s were tacky. The art wasn’t good but the investment in it was so enthusiastic. This immediately made many people, inside and out of the art world, draw the conclusion that this was either some type of bubble, money laundering scheme, or other unpleasant thing. Either way, it was a more blatant and open commodification of art than even attending a Sotheby’s auction. NFT’s were treated similar to trading stocks, paving way for the culture of the current crypto-based betting markets we see today. Which brings me to this quote by Moxie Marlinspike:

So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification

To me, the entire bedrock of web3 blockchain feels inherently scammy. I’m not totally sure if the technology is still in the same state as it was when this blog post was written (2022), but the idea that two companies are essentially the bouncers of the blockchain is the most crypto-y, web3-y thing I’ve ever read about it. Cryptocurrency is the most widely known aspect of web3, I think, and has ushered in a world of easy rug-pull, pump and dump financial schemes and a parallel economy to the stock market, except more volatile and less anchored in reality (although the current AI bubble says otherwise). I do believe there’s a lot of interesting technology around web3, and I bet at some point some sort of really useful feature will evolve out of this, but for now it’s synonymous with con-artists and financial crime (not terribly surprising considering the original obvious use case of crypto being the online ordering of hard drugs). Mostly because every news-worthy story around it is a scam or related to criminal activity.

Some stray thoughts about the other reads:

• I am not so sure the majority of people using the web care so much about the level of consent which Anil Dash talks about. Sure, people are enraged right now about how LLM’s are trained, but how long will that last? I do believe people care about the “enshittification” of their platforms defined by limiting them to certain algorithmic silos, or having “smart” tools embedded they never asked for (why does my Firefox browser right-click into ChatGPT now?), but overall, I think a lot of people do not mind the level of quasi-personalization the constant tracking as afforded them in a lot of contexts. I am bothered by it, as are most of the people in the room with me at ITP, but we are a tech-focused crowd. Does my mom care that Mark Zuckerberg changed the TOS on instagram? Probably not.
• I feel strongly that the only way to counter all of the spying is to simply remove yourself from all social media. I know that’s not the only place it’s happening, it’s everywhere, but that’s where it’s most egregious. At some point people will need to make the decision on whether or not they like or need (for their livelihood) Instagram, and if they care enough about removing their data from that pool, than they will. I have no social media (except an anonymous Reddit account and linkdin), because I made this calculus and I recognize that I am lucky that my job is not tied to engaging followers on sites like instagram.