Brave new world of Web3

Web3 is everywhere these days. So what is it all about? Sixteen years ago I wrote about something called Web 3.0. Back then, we had a rather different idea about where the internet was heading. We had just survived the first great transformation of the Web 2.0, and intoxicated by possibility, bandwidth and probably too much coffee, assumed the next version would somehow make everything smarter. How charmingly naive we were.

So, lets wind back the clock a bit to get some context. The first web of the early 1990s was a primitive beast. Static pages filled with grey backgrounds, blue links and large slabs of text pretending to be newspapers. There were no influencers and no algorithm desperately trying to keep you angry. In retrospect, it sounds rather pleasant.

It was also painfully limited, so around the turn of the millennium we started building what eventually became known as Web 2.0. Browsers improved. HTML and CSS grew teeth. AJAX appeared. social applications multiplied like rabbits in an unattended vegetable garden. Remember RSS? Anyone? Hello? Bueller?

The dream was that the next step would be the semantic web: structured information, interconnected data and machines intelligent enough to understand what all our information actually meant. Instead, we got Facebook. The engineers had apparently forgotten one small detail about human civilization: whenever you build something useful, somebody will eventually figure out how to monetize the living shit out of it.

The next step was thought to be a data-driven semantic web, but this was perhaps a naive vision by technical experts, as the driving force turned out to be the economy (surprise), turning the web into the chaos engine we all love and hate today. The road to hell, as it turns out, is paved with proprietary APIs.

A handful of Silicon Valley companies gradually turned large parts of the supposedly open internet into enormous gated communities. They owned the platforms, controlled the algorithms and stored the data. We supplied the content for free, and we loved it.

We happily surrendered photographs, friendships, political opinions, eating habits and embarrassing holiday pictures in exchange for little red notification icons and the opportunity to tell several hundred loose acquaintances what we had for breakfast.

Then somebody dusted off the old Web 3.0 label, removed the decimal point and introduced Web3. This time the revolution comes with blockchains. The pitch is seductive enough: decentralize everything, remove the corporate gatekeepers and give ownership back to the users. Instead of trusting some giant company with your digital existence, cryptographic keys and distributed networks supposedly put you back in control.

The data is secured by private keys in the block chain ecosystem, making Web3 more resilient and supposedly protected from the claws of large companies. Power to the people. Provided, of course, that the people don’t lose their private keys.

Then there are NFT (non-fungible tokens), digital certificates of ownership that has become one of the more spectacular manifestations of the Web3 gold rush. Artists could theoretically receive royalties when their work changed hands, and combined with the incredible hype this is solid gold for some people right now. If someone can sell a computer-generated image of a monkey for 300 000 USD, I guess no one really knows where this is heading, except that it’s inevitable but messy in the words of Mark Manson.

Where does all this end? Nobody knows. Which is, admittedly, part of the fun.

Perhaps the most interesting development is that while everyone has been arguing about blockchains, tokens and decentralization, the boring old web may be quietly making a renaissance comeback. People are rediscovering personal websites, independent publishing and the strange idea that perhaps stuff we create online doesn’t have to live inside somebody else’s corporate amusement park.

I rather like that idea. But before declaring another glorious revolution, there is some unfinished business.

Accessibility remains a disaster. The WebAIM Million project continues to find widespread accessibility problems across the web, such as an average of 50.8 errors per page, where 96.8% of web pages had detected WCAG 2 failures. After decades of specifications, standards, conferences, browser wars and endless arguments about markup, we are still producing websites that many people simply cannot use.

Fifteen years ago, the web-standards generals would have heard those numbers, grabbed their pitchforks and marched toward the barricades. Today, most of us are retired from that particular line of service, and apparently everyone else is busy buying monkeys.

Whatever Web3 eventually becomes, I doubt it will resemble the PowerPoint presentations, crypto manifestos or venture-capital fever dreams being circulated today. Technology rarely has the decency to evolve according to plan. But something is changing. Maybe decentralization really will return some control to users. Maybe blockchain technology will find genuinely useful applications once the gold rush subsides. Maybe the independent web will crawl out from underneath the social-media machine, bruised but alive.

Or maybe we’ll simply invent an even more complicated way to post pictures of breakfast. Either way, the ride should be interesting. Stay tuned.